by Jess McCuan     .     photo by Brent Fleury

Not long after she returned from Zimbabwe in 1990, Lochie Overbey told a Michigan newspaper reporter that all her preconceived notions about the country dissolved the moment she stepped off the plane. “At any one time there are 5,000 thoughts in your mind,” she said of her two-month, Fulbright-Hays-sponsored research mission to Africa for Michigan State University. “Wherever I went, I felt this is where I belong.” Nearly 20 years and 20 countries later, the retired educator still seems to have just as much zeal for each place she visits, a sense of connectedness to the country and the people in it. “When I travel, I’m the student. I’m like a sponge,” she says.

She’s also a bit like a museum curator. Wherever she’s lived, she’s filled her homes with hundreds of folk art objects from around the world. Yes, she owns beautiful paintings and sculptures, but her prized possessions are the utilitarian objects: rakes and butter churns, seed boxes and quilt beaters, the tools and gadgets that helped people in faraway lands get through their everyday lives. In some cases, she bartered for such items, offering up T-shirts, cassette tapes, Susan B. Anthony dollars and anything else she could think of that might be or seem valuable. After her Zimbabwe trip, she hauled back more than 100 African objects, from baskets and bowls to giant porcupine quills and odd musical instruments made from Pepsi bottles.

Overbey, a single mom, and her daughter Shannon traveled the world together. In 1975, when Shannon was seven, Overbey was accepted at a doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She and Shannon loaded up their gold Ford hatchback with all their belongings and started driving east from Lexington, Kentucky—looking, as Overbey described later in a letter, like a scene out of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. In the passenger seat, Shannon was equipped with a flippable notepad with pages that read, “I’m lost” and “Which way is north?” so that she could flag nearby cars at stoplights. When they got lost on the New Jersey Turnpike, Overbey was sure that the policeman who helped them must have sized them up immediately and thought: “Damn hippie hillbillies!”

And their adventures were only beginning. A few years later, when Shannon was 12, Overbey got a yearlong Fulbright Scholarship to teach at a school outside Sheffield, England. Shannon attended school there and Lochie worked at a pub when she wasn’t teaching. The academic work was fascinating, but Lochie loved the pub. Shannon could play in a room upstairs and Lochie got to know nearly every person who walked in. One day, nearly 100 people ended a day of fox hunting by going to the pub, and Lochie remembers grilling hamburgers for all of them as their horses drank straight from a beer keg. After that, the mother-daughter duo strapped on backpacks and set off on a European tour. Then it was off to Morocco and the Canary Islands. Shannon says by that time, her head was spinning. “We rode camels, we saw snake charmers,” says Shannon, now 40 and living in Atlanta. “In one picture, I have ten snakes wrapped around my neck and one going down my shirt. It was crazy.”

Overbey’s friends have teased her over the years about the museum-like quality of her homes. But Overbey is proud to report that all her houses, especially her current home in Hendersonville, have been dog-friendly and kid-friendly, never too formal or too quiet to throw a party in. “The greatest compliment anybody can give me is that this place feels warm,” she says. Overbey is currently president of the board of trustees at the Arts Council of Henderson County, and she likes nothing more than to invite a crowd of local artists and artsy types over to her house to take in the sunset.

Born in Murray, Kentucky, Overbey has been traveling for as long as she can remember. At age eight, she says she was positively bowled over by the Badlands of South Dakota. She spent summers during junior high and high school doing missionary work with a teacher in Oregon and Washington. Though she has now seen most of America and many other countries, there are still a few stops left on her “life list.” In late June, Overbey and her friend Don traveled to the Arctic Circle to look for polar bears and white foxes, a trip that—along with seeing India and the Middle East—has been on her list for a long time. She feels confident she’ll get to all of them eventually. And wherever she goes, you can bet she’ll bring something back.