Thursday, June 29, 2006

This is a little meme-type thing that's been making the rounds. I'm including mine but it's perhaps not as good as it might be, I pretty much put in the first things that came to mind. You can find the template here. The original poem that was apparently the inspiration for the idea is here.

Where I'm from...

I am from fabric scraps, from DMC floss and long rainy summer afternoons.

I am from the white fake-Colonial with the big fragrant garden.

I am from the aspen trees, the wild goldenrod, the Deep Lock Quarry.

I am from special dinners on birthdays and creative problem-solving, from Gail and Bob and the Huttmanns and the Ameses. From people who worked the earth and whose descendents toil in the vineyard of the mind.

I am from the hard workers and the patient souls.

From the smart and the quiet and the dry-humored.

I am from white clapboard churches with soaring inner beams like a ship's hull turned upside down, where children sing how Jesus loves them and adults sing of how it is their Father's world.

I'm from Ireland and Scotland and Germany, from potatoes and lamb stew, from red cabbage and roast beef, from Stollen and butter cookies and Dundee cake.

From the woman who was still climbing up to fix her roof at 80, from the experimental WWI aviator, from the logging-camp accountant, from the one who wore an old winter coat so he could spend his money on books.

I am from newspaper cuttings pressed in books. From scrapbooks of McKinley's assassination and WWI. I am from recipes passed down and remembered, from laughter over a shared joke, from conversing in the kitchen while dinner cooks. I am from hiking on fall Saturdays, from libraries, from knowing about rocks and trees and caring about what different bugs are called.

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Two thoughts: first off, I started very specific to memories of my childhood, I find, and that's actually kind of where I finished up at the very end. The mid-part is more my trying to remember stuff about my grandparents and who they were and what they did, and it seems less personal to me. (My mother has custody of the McKinley and WWI scrapbook - her great-aunt kept them at the time those things were happening and they managed to make their way down to my mom. I've seen them. She also has a few pieces of the French "scrip" that the "our boys Over There" were paid in as her uncle Burt was a foot-soldier in WWI)

I'm also kind of homesick now, even though that white fake-Colonial is no longer my family's house, I'm a thousand miles from Deep Lock Quarry, and the favorite aspen tree was cut down circa 1988.

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