Lexington author Kim Edwards has a feature about Lexington in this month’s issue of Smithsonian.

She’s a New Yorker transplanted in Kentucky and seems to love everything Kentuckians love about the Bluegrass. Despite her use of Mammoth “Caves” instead of “Cave,” (sorry, we couldn’t resist) it’s still a great read. And it’s nice to see Kentucky get positive press.

When I moved to Lexington, Kentucky, 12 years ago, I often had the sense of having taken half a step back in time. It was nothing I could pinpoint exactly. Though Lexington is small enough that I can drive to pretty much any part of town in 15 minutes, it has all the cultural amenities you’d hope to find in a city of 255,000. There’s an opera house and a symphony, organic food stores, farmers’ markets, art films at the Kentucky Theatre, a terrific independent bookstore, a bluegrass music festival in June and an art fair in August. In recent years, condos have cropped up all over downtown, reflecting a new interest in urban living. It is a contemporary place.

Still, the past keeps drifting up, like memory. I first drove here in the spring, when the dogwoods and the redbuds were spilling like foam and fire against the green hills, the road curving amid horse farms and framed by miles of dry stone walls. Perhaps those timeless images shaped my initial impressions. Or maybe it was finding a local institution like Wheeler Pharmacy, founded 50 years ago, which still has a soda fountain and grill and a steady stream of regulars who line up for breakfast, lunch or after-school snacks, often ordering Ale-8-One, a ginger-flavored soft drink made nearby since 1926. The baggers in the grocery store all politely called me ma’am. To my amazement, they routinely offered to carry my groceries to the car. The hardware store, now closed, smelled of dust and metal and new wood, just like my grandfather’s lumber business in upstate New York, where as a child I used to play in the aisles amid the bins of nails and walls of doorknobs.

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