You could say that our love of rural communities is in our blood. My family (Sky speaking here) stretches back generations in Eastern Kentucky, and Geoff (my husband) grew up on the Mesabi Iron Range in Northern Minnesota. We met in another rural area with a long history of mining when we were both teachers on the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners Area.
You can imagine the whirlwind romance. We both worked for the same school district but lived 70 miles apart. I was on the east end of the district teaching elementary school; Geoff was on the west end teaching high school special education. We spent many long hours driving across the high desert plains to visit each other in our respective “teacherages.” One raw spring day we were hunting for pot shards (pieces of ancient Anasazi pottery that are fun to find but very bad luck to collect) when Geoff proposed. Just as soon as I said yes, I told him I knew exactly the place we should get married: Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky.
Geoff and Sky at their 2005 wedding at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky
Pine Mountain Settlement School is a very special place. It is both a National Historic Landmark and a nature preserve in a remote, wild, and breathtakingly beautiful section of the Cumberland Mountains. My mother had been a teacher there when the organization operated as a K-8 school, and it had since become an environmental education center that could be rented out for weddings and other special events. We were married there in June of 2005, and almost exactly 10 years later we returned to make the Kentucky Mountains our home. When we returned in 2015, Geoff had accepted the job of Executive Director and we moved right into Big Log, an aptly-named log cabin that was built in 1913 in the shadows of the mountains.
Now, a few things happened in the 10 years between getting married at Pine Mountain and moving back. We went to graduate school — Harvard, to be more precise. Geoff got an MBA then a PhD, and I got a PhD then worked as a post-doc while Geoff finished his doctorate. And we had two children, the first of whom we named “Harlan,” never thinking for a minute we would move there. The second was named “Perry” by his older brother, but those of you familiar with the region will recognize right away that “Perry” is another county in Eastern Kentucky, often known for its county seat of Hazard.
As you can imagine, spending a decade at Harvard was both wonderful and a little disorienting. We were on a very specific path to become research scientists and faculty who climb the ladder of their positions towards tenure. We both did a lot of consulting, writing cases and books, and Geoff even managed to launch a software company and secure almost $1 million in funding for it from the National Science Foundation. Through all of this, Eastern Kentucky played a major role in our work, in part because we had family to visit and friends to help us: I conducted my dissertation research in Harlan County and Geoff conducted a pilot project for his software company in Whitesburg. Still, when Geoff was graduating and it was time to look for jobs, we took the path many expected and looked for dual faculty appointments.
So what happened?
This picture shows Connie the one time she was strong enough to hold baby Perry in January of 2015
It is a question we get asked a lot. How did we end up at a small non-profit in Harlan County? As you might expect, there is no simple answer. But the most direct one is that my mother was dying. In 2012, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Multiple Myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer that is non-survivable. The median lifespan with her type of tumor was 21 months. There is nothing like the realization that time on earth is limited and precious to bring life into perspective and priorities into focus. A job in Kentucky was suddenly very high on the list, and jobs that allowed us to make direct and meaningful differences in the community seemed ideal. Even more, it allowed us a chance to reconnect our children with the things in life we hold important: time in nature, time with family, knowing neighbors and a community. Faith.
We moved to Kentucky on May 18, 2015. It was our son, Harlan’s, 5th birthday when we packed up a 16-foot U-Haul in Harvard Yard and headed south, and Perry was just a 5 month old baby. New jobs started on June 1st, then we flew back to Geoff’s graduation on June 12. Then, on June 27th, Connie died after experiencing a bad reaction to a new chemotherapy regimen she was trying. Her death was both beautiful and devastating, and to say that our first months in Kentucky were difficult is an understatement.
But those few months, as hard as they were, also helped us to clearly see what mattered most. We will forever be grateful to those who surrounded us with love during that difficult time and made this place very much our home. We have taken on new and different roles since that beginning, but we know that we are firmly rooted in the Kentucky Mountains. We hope to create businesses and opportunities that reflect the tremendous beauty and potential of this very special corner of the world that we call home.
