Yesterday, researching who I wanted to pull for in today’s Kentucky Derby, I ran across a fun statistic. Seventeen of the 20 mounts in the race were born in the Bluegrass. The Lexington newspaper had all the birthplaces, many of them clustered in the Pisgah Pike, Versailles area near where my parents used to live.

I didn’t know all of the farms (though I knew some, most notably Calumet, with its distinctive white and red trim). But I know all of the places, know the two-lane roads that wind to them, the way the Osage orange tree branches arch over their lanes. The roll and tilt of the land is familiar to me; it’s what I grew up with, too.

Reading those farm names, I could smell the tobacco scent that would waft through the air in the fall when I was a little girl, back when the big auction houses were still there. I could smell the aroma of Lexington’s own racetrack, Keeneland, an amalgam of spilled beer and turned soil.

Once these places were part of my external landscape, now they’re part of my internal one.