Zelda & Scout started on a Post-It. It started in an iPhone note, at a music festival on the banks of the Ohio, in a swimming pool, and on a subway ride to Brooklyn. It started in text messages and long springtime walks and late night conversations. It started over bourbon and barbecue, cookies and beer.

Jennifer Harlan and Kelsey Goldman have known each other since the 6th grade. They both found themselves in New York after college, although they took different routes to get here. As the months dragged on, they found themselves missing their old Kentucky home, struggling to explain their heritage to the new people they met, trying to reconcile the place they call home with the place they live, and questioning whether this big, cold, intimidating, thrilling city was really the place for them. Those questions became a conversation, which became scribbled pages in a Moleskine, which became this blog.

If you lived in almost any other country in the world and moved the distance it takes to get from the South to the Northeast, you would be in a different country. An ex-pat. Yet in America, with its vast expanses, your new home is just another piece of good ole U.S.A. This country of ours is full of vastly different geographic and socio-economic and cultural landscapes, and yet we smush this patchwork together and call it monochrome. Zelda & Scout confronts this assumption. It investigates the idea of regional identity, the traditions and tastes and quirks that make a place tick. It explores the complicated concept of home, particularly for, dare we say it, millenials, who find themselves in a post-college, pre-”real world” limbo where nothing — who you are, what you want, where you plant your roots, if you have roots at all — is certain. Through interviews, reporting, and personal observation, it gathers a diverse range of perspectives, with the hopes of arriving at some semblance of an answer to these nagging questions that keep us up at night.

Where is home? Is it where you’re coming from, where you are, or where you might be going? Is it all of these and more? Will you ever find a place that checks all the boxes, or are we always going to be missing somewhere?

We don’t have the answers. We’re trying to figure it out. Bless your hearts for coming on this journey with us.