What a wonderful day to be holed up with friends! The white-trunked alder trees and the deep green hemlocks are whipping around in on-again, off-again rain. Our friends are Master Gardeners here, interested in history and genealogy, biology and ham radio. We have plenty of old friends in common and the talk flows easily. As soon as the wind lets up somewhat, we will head south into Oregon to see one more couple from “the old days”…also MGs and hams.
I mentioned on Facebook a few days ago that we had been going through old copies of Junior Scholastic and having lots of laughs. Junior Scholastic is/was a weekly news magazine for junior high students. Our school must have subscribed to them because we got to take them home and I have maybe 30 or so spanning the years of 1957 to 1960. I kept them for laughs for a long time but now I recognize how valuable they are in teaching far more than they intended to teach. Sure, the articles were well-written and timely and were meant to educate us about the peoples and events of the time. But now, some of the ads and the advice columns reveal ever so much more about the time we lived in. As I have time, I will go through and add to this blog some of the choicest bits and pieces, but right now they are in the trailer which is parked down a steep hill from the home we are staying in. Hiking down there in this weather is not on my agenda.
My interest in history has evolved slowly and was accelerated by a story I read long ago. An English writer told about the farm he lived on. He knew it had been farmed for a thousand years. Often he would look out over its hills from his writing cottage and wonder how it had been 100 or 500 or 1000 years before. He had the idea of gathering together all the previous owners of the land and lining them up in chronological order. He knew he could probably not ask questions of the first owner…the language and the culture would have changed so much in 1000 years that they probably could not communicate…but he could ask the owner before him and he could ask the owner before him and so on. Information could be passed up and down the line from one to another.
That idea really resonated with me as I struggled to flesh out some of the characters I had found in my family history. If only Grandpa Hastings had written down the stories he heard from his father. We would finally know where Great-Grandpa came from and how he got to Illinois.
As winter descends upon us, may I suggest that we each write down something from our lives. It might be stories for your grandchildren of your life as a child, it might be a journal for your own children of your thoughts as they grow, or it might be letters to someone in the future. It’s the little details that will make your life come alive years from now. Just mentioning that you emailed or texted someone will show your reader fifty years from now what the technology is today and what we take for granted. Stories told in their own time are much more revealing than stories told as history. But however you tell them…tell them. Do not leave this life without leaving something of yourself and your life behind.
I HAVE been reading your blog but just wasn’t sure how far south you had gone. Glad to hear that you are safe and having a great time. We are on our way to Price’s with the Morecis for dinner. Should be fun. Sally
Sally I trust that dinner was great fun and I wish we could have been there. I hope you said hello for us. And I’m sorry for giving you a bad time…I knew where we were…just didn’t make it very clear in the blog. I’ve been trying not to be too specific in naming friends and their tiny towns. We’ve been in Washington ever since the day we arrived at Keri’s, well before Thanksgiving.