Living in a small town it makes sense that some people marrying into the same family as their siblings. Let’s face it. We’re a small town full of large families. For years no one interacted outside of the community. Everyone went to school in town, went to church in town, worked on farms or in town. A lot of times they didn’t interact unless they got a job outside of the community or went away to college. So it makes sense that my little sister dated his little brother. That’s just the way it was. I was telling someone about it and he told me that he and his brother dated twins. His brother ended up marrying one twin but my friend didn’t. And he was from a different community.
I guess it’s not much different than the way a lot of us were raised. I went to school with the same kids for 8 years, then kept on with the same girls I had grown up with in high school. When it came time to get a date for a dance or prom I had to go back to the boys I was raised with because I didn’t have many opportunities to interact with young men my age. My dad liked it that way. But I went to school 4 blocks from home. I went to church there too. I shopped at the local grocery store, 3 blocks away from home. I went to the drug store and dime store too. The only people who shopped there were people from our neighborhood. The bank was across the street. There was a pizza parlor on the corner, next to the funeral home. We never had to leave the neighborhood. And we only had one car. Mom took that to work. Dad drove a company truck. We did get another car when my sister started driving but we couldn’t just get in the car and go. We had to ask permission. We had to tell Mom and Dad exactly where we were going and exactly when we would be home. Even then we still stayed in the general vicinity. We went to the ice cream parlor and then drove over to the park to swing while we ate our ice cream.
It’s the same in a small town. No one had an extra car. In fact, a lot of farmers didn’t have cars. They had pick-up trucks that they loaded their family into the back of when they went to church. The school bus picked them up for school. You didn’t run to the store for anything. If you had to go out of the community it was usually done once a week and you did all your business that day. You went to the grocery store and only bought things you didn’t have in your freezer or pantry. You went to the bank. If someone needed a new pair of shoes, they got to go but all they got to get was the shoes. It was a big even to go to town. And if you went to Paducah that might have been done 3 or 4 times a year. It wasn’t the norm. Not like today. Today if you need something no one thinks twice about driving the 20 or 30 miles to Paducah. No one dares think of the 10 miles into Mayfield. It used to be that Murray was where kids went to college and they only came home on the weekend, if then. Now we might drive to Paducah one night and head to Murray the next day. We’re all over the place.
And we know a lot more people than were raised in our little town.
You don’t see sisters dating brothers, let alone marrying them. Of course you don’t see the large families that we were raised in. We have 2, 3 or 4 children, not the 10, 12 or 14 of our parents or grandparents. Our children are dating people from all over the community, all over the county, all over the state, all over the country, all over the world. My niece moved off to Nashville after college and met a man whose family is from New York. My daughter, who we couldn’t talk into milking while she was in high school, went off to college and studied dairy cows and then married a dairy farmer, from half-way across the state. My son, who wasn’t born in Fancy Farm, moved back to Louisville, where he was born, and found the love of his life and now lives up there. We’re scattered all over creation and back.
And that’s good. We need to know how the rest of the world is. We know how our community is. But it’s not good in that things are slowly but surely changing all around us. Some of us like the way things always were. Of course, there are plenty that are ready to catch up with the rest of the world.
What brought this all up though was trying to figure out how sisters could move all the way out to California from Fancy Farm and end up marrying cousins, also from Fancy Farm. So, Shirley & Bob, Lyndal & Carolyn, Rachael & Frances, Wanda & Janet, Betty and Elaine, thank you for keeping us all grounded in who we are. Good for you! And good for us!