I can still stand in the backyard of our McKay Street home and see a horse pulling a plow to till the ground for our father’s spring garden. I do not know what made the metal clanging sound as the hired worker walked behind that horse on an early morning. The jingling rhythm sound memory has stayed with me along with the comforting scent of Kentucky earth being turned over for another season of planting.
Our father became a gentleman farmer because we moved to McKay Street during the Second World War and Victory Gardens were a means to feed a growing family. McKay Street had the space for a garden out behind the garage.
The backyard garden would open a chapter in our lives that would prove to be more interesting than any history book could offer. Our father became an archeologist who would break up dirt clods to prepare a row for tomato plants and discover an arrowhead left behind by an Indian hunter. Season after season, the Kentucky soil gave up more secrets and we came to expect the annual tilling would add more arrowheads to our collection.
Years later, I would witness more history lessons when living on Illinois Avenue, a few miles from McKay Street. While playing along nearby Beargrass Creek, neighborhood children discovered, all in one spot, enough arrowheads to fill a wash tub. It was speculated the area had been a camping ground for hunters and the arrowheads were knapped there. But why they were all left was an unsolvable mystery.
I often wonder if a hunter, who walked where McKay Street would come to be, also sat beside Beargrass Creek in a bygone time. And I wonder if, on a quiet morning, he could hear the jingling rhythm echoing from his tomorrow, of a horse and worker plowing a Kentucky garden for spring planting