this time last year, indiana was covered in a fresh blanket of early snow. this year, it’s warm and wet. i don’t mind admitting i prefer it nice and comfortable like this.
 
my granddad is getting better every day, and you can see it most in his desire to tell and be told stories, to connect. we’ve been talking lots these past couple of days, and it’s amazing how healing it is - for him and me both. it’s through stories that we bond most - it’s our special language of love - and i’m reminded of when i was a little girl, back when i was the only grandchild old enough to sit upright on my own and participate at the family table: i’d be sat between both grandfathers, Walter on the right and Warren on the left. They loved to tell me where I came from, the history of my people and of the land where I was born. They’d go on for hours if my grandmothers let them - and I was more than content to always sit and listen.
 
Both came from a long line of poor farmers, though in different parts of the country, and both climbed out of abject poverty to eventually join the ranks of the middle class. Both were smarter than average, by a lot, and also quite resourceful.
 
My dad’s dad, Walter, a boy genius from southern Indiana, entered medical school at 16 years old, married a nurse at school - Charmaine “Tommie” Thompson - and went on to become one of the most beloved obstetricians in the region (I’ll tell you some fascinating stories about that some time). Later in life he became a highly skilled carpenter and cabinet maker, making furniture for the family and good friends, and even building a wooden sailboat and two ultra-light planes. He maintained throughout his life a strong sense of right and wrong, which included the virtue of simple living and humble fellowship. He died a couple years ago. And I’ll always cherish his resolve to maintain a relationship with me, the bastard child, all throughout my life, even if his son would not.
 
Warren, my grandfather on my mom’s side, was a scrappy kid who could always figure out the angles. During the worst years of the Depression, when the Dust Bowl had landed directly on top of northern Texas and New Mexico, things were pretty grim, he told me last night after watching Slumdog Millionaire, and there wasn’t a lot of laughing in his house. After his widowed mother, Johnnie, finally lost the farm and the family had to move into town (Littleton, Texas), my granddad started noticing how much happier the middle-class people were than the poor people. “So I decided to become middle class,” he said. He observed how they lived and what they did and noticed that the middle-class kids all went to school, so he would go to school. It was this connection that he made that would probably be the most important factor in my family’s upward mobility - and I have much in my life to thank for it. When he got older he thought he’d write the great American novel, and he and my grandmother, Jo Anna, would raise 8 children and live off the land. He bounced around to universities across the country - Texas A&M, Oklahoma City, Stanford and later Purdue - and became an agronomist, geologist, soil expert, writer and politician. He, like Walter, also lived a life of simplicity, but always contended with the contradiction - of showmanship and modesty.
 
Warren has always maintained that Walter was one of his biggest heroes. And to see them interact, I’d guess the feeling was mutual. They both have taught me the value of storytelling and of knowing your history, where you come from, who your people are. And along with that, a humble reverence for your fellow man.

As I spend time with my cousins, again all younger and not as lucky as I to have had such kinds of experiences sitting between two grandfathers spinning out stories, I realize how much of their struggles result from not really knowing who they are. Yes, that’s also part of being a young adult, but I’m reminded once again of the value of these stories passed down from generation to generation for revealing clues about how to be and how to get along in this world.
 
I told this to my cousin Andrew the other day, as he was saying goodbye to drive back up to Purdue. I don’t know if it sank in or not, but maybe at some point in his life, when he’s most in need of answers, he’ll draw upon that conversation and go searching out his family history. When that happens, I hope that I will have completed work that records these stories - the clues to life’s most challenging problems - so he may draw nourishment and inspiration to continue forging ahead.