Family Stories

As promised in my last blog, I’d like to update you on my trip to Indiana to research my next book. My mother was one of three sisters raised in Indiana, and I hope to base my next book on the sisters. Their mother passed away when the sisters were between eight and 15 years old. My mother and father moved from Indiana to Wisconsin with their children in 1952, well before I was born.

One of the three sisters, my Aunt Mary, is still alive and just celebrated her 99th birthday. My big sister and I made the trip to Indiana to help celebrate her birthday and for me to gather family stories.

My sister and I arrived in Ohio, just over the Indiana border, on Saturday night, to stay with my cousin and her husband. This cousin is Aunt Mary’s middle daughter and lives about an hour from Mary. There was a birthday party for Aunt Mary on the following day, Sunday.

I have to tell you that my aunt certainly doesn’t look or act her age. She lives alone in a small ranch house and has a large garden. She also has a perfectly groomed flowerbed and tidy yard, not a weed in sight. She mows her own lawn and enjoys tending her garden. She walks a mile per day every day. Every day! That’s more than I do. She is mentally sharp and has the wicked sense of humor and easy laugh that I remember my mother having as well.

My aunt didn’t want a birthday party, so we called it a family reunion. At that party, I saw cousins I hadn’t seen for ages. Some I hadn’t seen since I was seven or eight, others I hadn’t seen since I was 16, still others were last seen at my wedding. The faces were familiar, but names sometimes escaped me. Aunt Mary helped me out there. There was also a whole new generation, actually two generations, of family members I had not met before. There were more than 40 family members present, some coming from as far away as California and Florida. At the end of the day, I was exhausted. Aunt Mary, however, was still going strong.

Several family members shared funny stories and memories during the party, but I didn’t pull out my notebook or recorder to capture them. I did sit down for awhile that evening after the party and made notes of what I remembered, consulting my cousin and my sister to fill in a few blanks.

The day following the party, my sister, cousin, and I went to my aunt’s house, where two other cousins joined us. This day was to be for me to “interview” them. I use the quotation marks because I didn’t really do any interviewing. When we arrived, Aunt Mary had prepared us a lunch that included fresh snap peas and tomatoes from her garden, as well as a number of other dishes and two kinds of iced tea (sweet and unsweetened). My cousins supplied some leftovers from the previous day’s party. It was quite a feast. During the meal, Mary jumped up a couple of times to pull more items out of the refrigerator. She doesn’t sit still well, a trait I share.

After lunch, I pulled out my notebook and told them the aim of my book. The only question I asked was, “Do you have any funny stories to share?” Boy, did they! We spent a couple of hours sharing memories and stories, each memory spurring other recollections and more tales. There was a lot of laughter and only a few tears. As the afternoon went on, I gained a new appreciation for my mother’s family and its history. My oldest cousin had brought a candy jar that she remembered my grandfather having. I remembered the candy jar and the candy it contained from a visit to him that was over 50 years ago. I described where I remember the jar sitting atop a tall dark wood desk, and a couple of cousins confirmed that there was such a desk. The same cousin that brought the candy jar also did a drawing of the floor plan of the family home and shared pictures of the interior of the house.

As a family, we agreed that I shouldn’t try to write a non-fiction book based on the information I gathered. There are no skeletons in the closet or anything like that; it’s just that we all think it would be more fun if friends and neighbors try to guess how much is true and how much is made up if I make my book a work of fiction.

I left at the end of the day with several pages of notes, a warm feeling of love for family, and a zucchini from my aunt’s garden.