All is story

For years now, one of my cousins has insisted that I am to write the history of our family. She says she knows this because our great grandmother Amanda comes to her in her dreams and tells her things, and this is one of the things she told her. I always laugh and demur, because my cousin tells me this like it's an imperative, a criticism that I'm tarrying over my given task and need to get started. And, too, our great grandmother Amanda is so convenient in her comings and goings to this cousin, and the pronouncements that attend her appearances often seem to be after the fact, and with a big dollop of story thrown in. But now I'm thinking, why take issue with a little storytelling, especially since it has recently occured to me that I am in fact writing a kind of family history here on this blog, even if most of my family members don't know it exists. So maybe my cousin does speak to our great grandmother Amanda from time to time. Who am I to quibble with her claims of channeling this famously sweet spirit in her dreams?

As I was musing on all this, another cousin (there are a lot of cousins) sent me a New York Times piece on how giving one's children a family narrative, sharing stories that give them a sense of being connected to something that has weathered upturns and downturns and endured for generations, can make those children more resilient. Two researchers did a study through the course of years, and found that those children who knew such details as how their parents met, where their grandparents went to school, why that cousin was arrested, how this one's grandfather won the battle with alcohol, how that aunt loved to make a sale, were able to manage life's little and big crises more readily.

Which got me thinking again. I write this blog for myself, as a way to process, often for my own sanity. But sometimes I write it for my children, too, including my niece who reads here, as a record of our lives, a preservation of memories, and—it turns out—as proof that sad times, inconvenient emotional chemistry, occasional squabbles and sketchy actions by some family members, do not outweigh the gift of loving one another. Through the years I have watched this family enfold those of us who falter, never condoning bad behavior, demanding that we come correct, never hesitating to tell even the scalding truths, yet never letting each other go. This is the legacy of my mother and her siblings, the nine, and of their mother Ione, and also of her mother Amanda, who speaks to my cousin in the night.

The photo is of Aunt Maisy's back yard in Orlando. I can still see and hear my children and their cousins a decade ago playing slip-and-slide in a plastic pool on that lawn.