There’s an old African saying that goes: “Every time an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.” What a treasure we have in the stories of those who have decades of lived experiences on this earth. What a shame if we lose those libraries of stories because we don’t ask to hear them.
Last year, I took a trip to visit my grandmother. She is 96 years old and, much to her annoyance, she is slowing down. I wanted to ask her about her stories and her first response was to say “No one cares about me or my life.” Of course that’s not true — and now we have some of those stories recorded on audio and video.
Not only did I learn stories I had never heard before, but some of the stories were ones that some of her own children had not heard before. Here’s one that was new to my mom: It was during the Great Depression and things were rough. Jobs evaporated and many families faced desperate circumstances. Some families, though, found themselves with enough and to spare. My great-grandmother Freda was one of those. Her husband had the first car dealership in the area and they did fairly well for themselves.
She always fed the men who knocked on her door — after they did the odd jobs around her home that she held in reserve, just for them. She did not start a food pantry or nonprofit organization, she didn’t campaign for changes in public policy and most of the men she fed probably didn’t even know her name. She just did what needed to be done.
Another story had to do with the night she was born. It as January, 1922. The weather was cold and her father had covered the front of his car with an old horse blanket to keep the engine “warm” and make it easier to start. When my great-grandmother went into labor, it must have started quickly, because her husband left in such a hurry to fetch the midwife that he forgot to take the horse blanket off and it went flying. They never found it and my great-grandfather teased my grandmother for years that she cost him a good horse blanket. My aunt had heard the story of the horse blanket but did not realize that her mom had been born at home with a midwife. It can be easy to forget that one does not need to go back very many generations to find home birth was the norm.
I loved hearing about my grandmother’s stories about being a young bride, then a young mother without running water. One summer, she and her little kids picked and sold buckets and buckets of blackberries and made enough money that they could finally get an indoor toilet. That’s an accomplishment worth celebrating — at least in my world!
That story ties in with stories from my husband’s grandparents, who did not get an indoor toilet until my husband was in his teens. When they finally took the big step of getting a flushing toilet, they put it in the barn because “who would want to do their business in the House?!” Both of his grandparents passed away years ago and I know very few of their stories. His father has also passed away and his mother has dementia and just like that, the stories are gone.
What stories lie hidden in the “libraries” of your lives? What are you doing to capture those stories before the library burns to the ground. Your time is short.
Holly Richardson, a regular contributor to The Salt Lake Tribune, is grateful for and fascinated by the stories of our lives.
