Neonjade

I researched my family roots some this week in Cadiz, Kentucky. I have an unreal quantity of relatives in that town that I don’t know one thing about. I’m directly related to a man that settled there around 1820. The majority of his descendants lived and died in Western Kentucky, forging unions with most of the other families in the area. I haven’t been there since I was a child though, and had no memory of the place. I found it amazing.

It’s a small town, but everywhere I went was bustling like an impossibly friendly city. I was raised mostly in small towns, and my husband lived in the same small town for most of his life, but Cadiz ramps up that “everyone knows everyone” vibe by, like, 10 million percent.

Hancock’s Market was packed in the afternoon and all the checkout people knew their customers and chatted with them and their neighbors as they priced their groceries. John L Street Library was a constant stream of in-and-out and people meeting and greeting. I laughed at myself at one point thinking I had found “the mall”, with all the young people interacting.

Even East End Cemetery: I wandered its rows for two days, spread over five different two hour shifts, and I don’t think I was alone for more than twenty minutes at any time. Sometimes it was maintenance people, but mostly it was loved ones visiting the site to talk a bit or place another memento. The drive by visits really had me smiling to myself. A car would pull up to an area, then the driver window would go down as the operator anxiously scanned their designated headstones and, assuming all the little statuettes, flags, flowers and what-nots were all as they should be, the window would go up and the car would move on.

I have never seen a more decorated cemetery. I took over a thousand pictures, only documenting about a third of the entirety, and almost every headstone had a little something on or next to it. Many had so many decorations that you couldn’t see any information on the stone. I was constantly bending to gently lift the edge of a flower arrangement or nudge a hanging plant to sneak a snapshot of the data buried under the gifts of remembrance.

There was no Home Depot, no Wal-Mart, no Best Buy, and no Kroger. At first it hit me as, “yep, this is a small town!” but even the smaller towns (population wise) that I and my husband were raised in had a major chain store or two. After wandering and watching, and after reading some of the old newspapers in my research efforts, I came to the conclusion that there will never be any of those big box stores in Cadiz. I believe they are very purposeful in what they allow into their community and that they believe in their community supporting each other.

Overall, it was like stepping into an alternate reality for me. I know I was in a small country town, but I easily obtained everything I needed during my visit and there was abundant technology around, including wi-fi hotspots everywhere I needed one and laptops and cell phones being used all around me. The number of people around me at all times continually astonished me. Then count in the complete lack of chain stores and neon presentation of consumables, the fact that it’s a dry county, and the continuing real interactions between human beings every where you look and it just seems like a place of contradictions that couldn’t possibly exist.

I know there are aspects of the place that I could never truly appreciate, like the dry county part – I enjoy a good glass of wine and my husband loves his specialty beers – but I sure envy them their sense of community and wonder what Madison, AL could be like with a bit more of that.