Yesterday I awoke with this very same idea being as my wife and I live
here 'in the middle of nowhere' away from all the rest of our immediate
family; the threat of contacting and spreading Covid, a further
isolating experience, making things terribly worse especially during
holiday periods and birthdays.
The wife stays in contact with our
children, and grandchildren via Facebook/FaceTime, etc; occasional
texts, and emails but, the way I see it, most of it is small talk
with little substantive exchange of information, something I lament
because their aging mother's/grandmother's, once-illustrative life is
little known among them. I foresee regret on their parts for not asking
her about herself NOW; born in 1944, what was her childhood like?; who
were her her parents? Her siblings? What did she think of as a young
girl. Where did she go to school? What was it like to raise four
children all under the age of five? Learn the story of her life as only
she can tell it before its too late.
We get caught up in the
immediate in the headlong rush of our lives, and don't think to ask the
elders about theirs, thinking or not thinking that they'll always be
there until they're not; then later by chance or design, learn something
about them that was unknown, then painfully realize their woeful
failure to ask them when they had the opportunity.
Two True Stories 1990-1993 " We didn’t make her fearful, we made her brave." Bag O' Bonny Turning in at Bemis Hill, in Roseau County, Minnesota, I snapped a few images of the nicely maintained CCC-era log cabin and its immediate sledding hill. Leaving, I turned west on the road I came in on, then a half mile or so, took the Bemis Hill Forest Road north along the bottom of the Hill when my daughter Bonny called from Ankeny, Iowa, where she lived then, several hundreds of miles away. I always thought how amazing it was to be in the middle of nowhere and get a phone call. I was leaning against my car along a remote northwest Minnesota forest road in Beltrami Island State Forest with the steep legendary sledding hill behind me and a 700,000 acre forest around me, possibly making me its sole human occupant for five square miles, conservatively speaking, the thought of which is just aw...
Comments