Entry #1

11*7*23

Today is the 64th anniversary for Jeane + Charlie,

my grandparents : Mumbie + Dandy

they married here in Kentucky

Each of us born in Tennessee, today I find myself drawing from Dandy's Knoxvillian charm and Mumbie's fervent + fashionable flair.

They've both passed on from these hills. I've been left with a lot of questions. They're figuring out how to be aids after ascendence and I'm trying to figure out how to understand their messages, their influences, and the ways they are still guiding our family.

Connecting with Mumbie, my paternal grandmother, has been a journey of restoration. I am finding that through sitting with the family matriarch, a nurturing nature has made itself at home in my chest.

I've been tending to her energy and her life by visiting her favorite places, returning to the emails we collected, and every now and again, I'll order myself a true buttermilk biscuit and it will feel like we're in a breakfast booth again, gabbing away.

She encouraged me to write, often. Me in Kentucky, her in Knoxville, she would message to hear my latest draft of a new fable or to catch the update on the weekend's soccer tournament. Always doting:

"I am so thrilled that you are mine! YOU are such a blessing!"

Sifting through our correspondences, (email: weirdly accessible digital archive) has been healing parts of me I didn't know to feel into. I'm only beginning to tap into the history, memories, and mysteries that have led to my existence today. The slow and steady untangling, through creative documentation, is surprisingly refreshing.

All the while, my siblings have weddings of their own. My parents celebrate another re-up of their Smoky Mountain nuptials. Love continues to flow. And this is the point of study that touches me the most.

Love is my favorite subject. My destiny relies on me opening myself up to love in as many ways as I can. I am to feel love in many languages + I am to understand the love that cannot be found in language.

I am to find love in and outside of my own culture, my own history, and my own identity. There is love for me in and outside of the confines that I understand it to reside.

My destiny asks me to study love, to study truthfulness, to study language and the ways it connects us, to study the ways language make me feel and makes me sound and how new dialects, new inflictions, new inquisitions, unlock new realms.

Simultaneously, love bellows through my bloodline. Reaching into the relationships of the couples that paved the roads and wrapped the power lines in Kentucky + Tennessee feels important to me. There is a vibrant current of joy and union in this mountain stretch and I will trace it.

By investing in relationships throughout my family, both alive and beyond, I am reimagining what connection can look like. This is allowing me to be more curious in my day-to-day interactions, in the bonds I share with those around me.

This has me investigating what it means to move through queer relationships, through alternative connective structure. What does it mean to bring recovery + queerness into the current social ecosystems we navigate? This is what Mumbie and I have started chatting about. And I gotta get writing.

Anywho,

language + legacy + legend

begin to unfold

Happy 64th, Mumbie + Dandy

Thanks for being here.

hallelujah