Home is where your grandparents live

Several years ago my grandmother gave me the embroidery book on the right.  Purchased years ago, it is a 35-cent copy of 100 embroidery stitches.  As it turns out, they’re still making the book and I bought a new one a couple of years ago. They’re exactly the same inside, it’s just a new cover.

I was doing some embroidery the other day and chanced upon these while looking for a stitch. It made me think of my grandparents, who live in the Midwest. My parents are both from the midwest, and my aunts and an uncle still live there (hi Aunt B!).

Although I mostly grew up in Texas my summers and winters at my grandparents’ farm left a lasting, deep impression on me. When people ask me where I’m from, I think of the midwest as much as I think of Texas. It’s part of who I am.

The family farm and surrounding area is a vastly different place than was our home in the suburbs. The town my grandparents live in (that’s a view of the center of town down the “main street” in the picture to the left) is really tiny and quiet, whereas suburbia is large and noisy. At the farm there was room to roam - to shady creeks, sunny ponds, through fields of the blackest dirt, down quiet gravel roads. In the suburbs there’s concrete and houses and the neighborhood pool. Suburbia is mostly newish while the farmhouse was oldish and creaked. The farm had much more of a sense of place, a sense of roots and ties and tradition, all things I value.

My grandmother always had a big garden, and crisp, sweet corn was usually in season when I was there. Tall flowers, too. I weeded corn fields, sweating in long sleeves to avoid the sharp leaves. I fed cattle, and some noisy pigs. I had a fuzzy kitten named Diana one year. I always body surfed two-story bales of hay. I had a best friend named Katie. I went to the Maid Rite visiting grandma Smith, and looked through her humongous collection of Stuff packed into small areas. I froze my arse off in my uncle’s coveralls one winter playing with cousins. I wondered just how many relatives my parents had. I swam upstream against the strong Mississippi current and swallowed mud. I wondered what the one-room schools my dad went to were like. My patient aunt tried to teach me to drive a standard transmission on hilly gravel roads. There were holidays and snow, summers and creeks, but mostly there were people I loved.

It’s hard to say, when you think of who you are, to figure out where it all came from in making up the mishmash of you. This is one part of me that’s clear.