from the editor
Y ON THE COVER
Behind the Masks
Carnetta Kennedy has built a strong sense of community in her classroom at Shades Cahaba Elementary even with students and staff wearing masks each day. Photo by Lindsey Culver Design by Connor Martin-Lively
Y’all, we made it. Believe it or not, 2020 will have an end, and it’s just around the corner as we wrap up this issue. I certainly can’t recall a more tumultuous season or, ironically, one where I spent oh so much time slowing down and enjoying the simplicity of the everyday goodness. As I’m looking back through this issue’s stories, most seem to be telling microcosms of 2020. Let’s start with tragedy: the Jesus Man, John Brown, whose preaching in front of the Lakeshore Walmart had become a fixture in our community. Then came 2020, taking his life with it. Because wasn’t that how this year felt as a whole, that it extinguished the sweet constants in our life, the ones we’d never realized how much we treasured? And all the more tragically, that it snuffed out so many lives as we watched news story after life happening unveil yet another calamity to drag this year down further and further? But in the midst of all that messiness, there came another plot line: the adventures we wouldn’t have otherwise taken. As we chronicle in this issue, for five 2014 Homewood High School graduates that looked like mountain biking from the Canadian border to the Mexican border not on their first choice of a route, but the more extreme, rugged one befitting their extreme sense of adventure that arguably borders insanity. Perhaps your detours weren’t that, well, intense, but their story’s themes of venturing somewhere new outdoors, of having hours upon hours to spend with those who are closest to you, of making memories you might not have planned in any other time ring oh so 2020 true, don’t they? And then there’s the place where we all found ourselves forever on end this year: home. While you might be tired of time inside yours, in the pages ahead we take you on a tour of Lesley Hendon’s collection of vibrant antique pieces that create the coziest of spaces full of personality. Looking back at her rooms we photographed as I sit inside my own, I am reminded of how the space where we wake each morning, where we dirty dishes and fill our stomachs, where we recline to rest and sleep ushers in a constant of comforts as tumult escalates in our larger worlds. And that’s not even getting to our interviews with a few of our many heroic teachers sharing their passions through extra creative means this year, plus a look a delicious cinnamon roll business that began not in a pandemic but in another season where the woman behind it found herself at home more than she ever had been. 2020—it’s been a wild ride we’re all ready to usher out, but we sure are glad we’ve lived out in in home sweet Homewood. Here’s to hoping your year ends with joyous memories amidst all the crazy!
madoline.markham@homewoodlife.com HomewoodLife.com 9
