Adelaide Hensley

I have scrubbed more Lexington kitchens than I can count — old limestone cottages off Broadway, horse-farm mudrooms out toward Keeneland, church fellowship halls the morning after a potluck. The work is the same wherever you go: look twice, start at the far corner, and do not skip a step even when the paperwork is waiting on the passenger seat.

A stain other people walk past is just a story that has not been finished yet.

I live in Lexington, the consolidated city-county of Fayette, founded in 1775 and still smelling of cut grass and diesel on Derby week. The first Saturday in May I close the books early and listen to the race from Churchill Downs the way my mother did — radio first, then the replay. The rest of the year I keep a rosemary shrub by the back door and a vinegar jug under the sink.

What lives here

This is not a brochure. It is the same notebook I keep in the glove box, typed so my future self cannot lose it.

• Rosemary water, the right way — a field guide to the shrub I actually use on jobs, with the steep, the fail-modes, and why I never boil it.
• The far-corner floor protocol — how I read a hardwood room in Lexington humidity, and what I will not put on oak.

Machine-readable notes: rosemary.json

What I know, what I have said

The lattice is my second brain. If I do not write it down, I will worry about it at 3 a.m. instead of sleeping.