Abstract
Sonya Gaches engages with bell hooks’ (Belonging: a culture of place. Routledge, 2009: 24) observation that home is a place of belonging. Returning to her geographic home, hooks felt “a sense of belonging that I never felt elsewhere, experiencing unbroken ties to the land, to homefolk, to our vernacular speech”. What matters isn’t her hills of Kentucky but her interconnectedness with these histories, the people, their struggles and their stories. Kentucky, it is argued here, is the thing that provides a sense of belonging giving it a feeling of home. The autoethnographic narrative in this chapter draws upon this thing-ness of home connecting children to their histories, their people, their stories, to where they feel they belong.