As I write, the National Anthem’s being sung at Churchill Downs for the start of the Kentucky Derby.
I’ll be pulling for a horse not favored to win.
His owner grew up in eastern North Carolina on a little stretch of road in the country. It’s paved now, but people have living memory of it being dirt… and I have an affinity for old dirt roads in these far reaches.
Once upon a time, I was a child who stayed in a little house on a dirt road in the summertime. I swung from a tire swing that Granddaddy hung from the pecan tree all studded with woodpecker holes. I swung to the deafening rise-and-fall rhythms of cicada-rattles, alongside the old dirt road across from the clearing where timeworn gravestones stood over people my grandmother knew when she was a child. I swung back and forth, round and round through the dappled afternoon, singing a favorite folk song from my father’s Peter, Paul, and Mary album…
Stewball was a racehorse
and I wish he were mine
he never drank water
he always drank wine…
The song goes on to say how the speaker bet on the gray mare and the bay, when:
ahead of them all,
came a-prancin’ and a-dancin’,
my noble Stewball.
The hoot owl, she hollered…
This past week, early one morning, I recorded a hoot owl (barred owl) hollering from the pines behind my home.
Memory runs so deep, so strong.
And so I pull for the horse named Barber Road, whose odds keep going down in these remaining moments before he gets to the gate.
Here’s to my own beloved road by another name in eastern North Carolina, and childhood, and belonging, and ol’ Stewball who wasn’t favored to win, either, but did, and to the hoot owl, the stories, the songs, and overcomings.
And here’s to you, Barber Road.
Run on.
Thoroughbred racehorse. MIKI Yoshihito. CC BY 2.0.
Update: Barber Road finished 6th. By now the world knows that Rich Strike, the least-favored horse (80-1,) took the Derby in the second-biggest upset in its 148-year history. Secretariat, the first racehorse I remember, and who still fills me with awe to the point of tears, holds the record.
lit bits and pieces 
I, too, root in contests for competitors to whom I can relate due to the kinds of parallels you mention here. I enjoyed reading your memories of summertime in your youth and of folk music. You have a gift for creating a mood in your reflections.
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Thank you especially for those words about creating mood…trying to capture what I feel. Those were halcyon days.
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Such a great post rich in nostalgia and those simple joys of life. You took me back to my grandparents’ home along a dusty dirt road, tire swings, and picking rhubarb in the garden! Thanks for the stroll down memory lane!
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I feel like I could write much more of those long-ago days and the sense of peace and belonging. Rich, rich memories for which I am so grateful – I can hear the same in your words. Thank you!
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