String of Family

We recently watched Woman in Gold and if you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and carve out a couple of hours as it is beautiful with a capital "B."  

Tears ran down my face several times from being reminded of the hard, hard moments people have gone through in history.  The kind of hard like saying goodbye to your parents knowing you will never see them again.  The kind of hard like running for your life through the streets trying desperately to escape the people you know want nothing more than to see you suffer until you finally die because they believe you are worth less than nothing.  The kind of hard like starting your life completely over in a brand new country knowing you don't have your family lineage in its entirety and never will again. 

The kind of hard which quickly puts what I think of as hard into a perspective of well, let's just move right along because love a duck, this life is easy.

After the movie, we came upstairs and vacuum-packed the herbs picked from the porch earlier in the evening in anticipation of the first chilly frost.  As I was writing basil, spicy basil, and thyme on the little pouches I turned to Kiel and said, "My parents would be proud of us right now.  I can't tell you how many nights I went to sleep with the sound of the vacuum-packer sealing up whatever it was they wanted to preserve." 

I come from a long string line of canning, freezing, doing whatever it takes to save food grown in the summer for the long North Dakota winter.  It is deeply rooted in my dad's family and in my mom's too.  Great-Grandma Alice didn't waste one bit of a butchered pig right down to the head and Grandma Gladys wouldn't have dreamed of letting even one carrot not be pulled from her massive gardens. 

I often think about the folks that came before me and pushed through enormous hardship.  My great grandparents coming over from Norway and Germany, my grandparents surviving the Great Depression, my parents getting through the droughts of the 80s...

It's a long history of grinning and bearing. 

A string of events that leads to me standing in the kitchen vacuum-packing herbs from the pots on the porch and my almost four year old niece Hazel learning how to get the kernels out of a durum head from her Auntie Em.

Family history makes us. 

It makes us have a reserve tank to pull from when needed.  

If I ever am faced with actual hard things, I like to think Grandma Gladys would come through in me with her quiet strong will and Great-Grandma Alice too, with her fearless attitude. 

I like to think I'd pull from the string which has connected us all.  

And so, I say a simple thank you.  Thank you to my great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents.  For having grit.  For getting through.  So that I can flutter around and take pictures of pretty things, travel all around, and live this life.