Chippy

To Matt, Josh & Lauren,

Every summer we seem to find a wild animal in the yard that needs to be rescued.  The box turtles that wander aimlessly through the grass after climbing up the hill from the creek or the robins that build their nest on the front door wreath where comings and goings are sure to disturb or the Monarch caterpillars in the milkweed patch at the side of the house that are waiting to be picked off by marauding wasps.  Whether your father likes it or not, you’re all drawn to helping creatures in need and really, it’s not your fault.  The rescue gene runs deep through your Durandetta & Frisk bloodlines.  Your great-grandma Mia had a pair of pet raccoons named Nanette & Pierre. Uncle John tells the story of the baby blue heron that rode the sewing machine treadle in Grandma Durandetta's kitchen.  And I had BeeBop the robin whose untimely demise is cemented lore in our family’s collective memory.  Wait til you hear that sorrowful tale one day!   

My own first wild animal rescue actually happened before we moved to the farm.  I was about 3 or 4 years old and our family was living in a little house on Filbert Street in Curwensville.  There was a small backyard that led to a steep hill, thick with trees and brush.  Along the back perimeter was an old stone wall and chipmunk families used to make their homes among the crags and gaps.  

Grammy remembers how one morning I came into the house with my hands cupped together to show her what I had found while playing in the yard.  All she could see was a thin tail hanging out from under one thumb and she immediately thought I had captured a rat.  But as I opened my hands to show her my prize, she saw that it was a baby chipmunk that had fallen from its nest.  Realizing that its chances of survival were very slim, she allowed me to tuck a washcloth around it and place it in a shoe box while I kept vigil over the next several hours. 

Hours turned into days and amazingly, the little orphan survived and began to acclimate to being held and fussed over.  Soon, he was running around on the couch cushions and end tables and Grammy and Grandpa began to concede that I had adopted my first pet.  In no time at all, Chippy was living the high life in a hamster cage by night and charming everyone with his spunk and joie de vivre by day.   

There were pillows to climb and grapes to peel and pockets for hitchhiking and guitar strings for high-wire acrobatics.  Grammy even let him ride around on her pregnant belly as she grew round with Uncle Jason in the fall of 1977.  

By the following autumn, we had bought the Reynold Bloom farm in Olanta and were packing up the little house on Filbert Street.  I don’t have any memories of leaving town, but I do recall the first time we walked into the empty farm house and how the smell of paneled wood steeped in the smoky gauze of coal dust filtered through my nostrils.  I remember running through the lower field and pulling the dried seeds off the ragweed stalks and marveling that as far as my eyes could see, there wasn’t another house in view.  I recall walking into the attic for the first time and thinking that I was going to be swallowed up into the deep dark corners that seemed to press around me like towering curtains of black velvet.  So many memories of those earliest days on the farm, but all tales for other tellings.  

Uncle John reminded me recently about Chippy’s first day on the farm and how we almost lost him.  In the bustle of packing up the house, someone had set the hamster cage to the side, out of the way, but in the direct sunlight.  For hours, Chippy baked in the late August heat and by the time Grammy realized what had happened, he was limp and unconscious.  Fervent prayers and a series of dunks in a bowl of cool water brought him around and he survived to climb another couch.  How many rodents can boast of being saved not once, but twice, in their lives?  

Life on the farm brought new and exciting adventures for all of us, Chippy included.  While I discovered the dizzying joy of climbing to the top of the hayloft, some 30 feet above the barn floor, Chippy discovered the thrill of climbing up the drapes in the dining room and flinging himself to the rug below.  While I learned how to squeeze out the sweet autumn insides of Concord grapes from the branches of the arbor that stood like an old hunchbacked woman trying not to totter down a hillside, Chippy learned how to stuff his cheeks with the leftover watermelon seeds from a late summer picnic and then stash them for midnight snacking under a pile of pine shavings in the corner of his cage.  As I soon realized that catching a chicken on the run involved zigs and zags and turn-on-a-dime reflexes, none of which the human body is well suited to make, Chippy realized that the braid rug under the dining room table was a perfect racetrack which his slender, streamlined body was well suited to exploit.  (He even had built-in racing stripes!)  

Grandpa and I were recently reminiscing about him and laughing how he seemed to especially enjoy racing when the barn cats were at the glass patio door waiting to be fed.  All they could do was watch in maddening defeat as a perfect bite-sized snack made defiant laps around the rug just inches from their reach.   

As animated as he could be, he was also inclined to nesting.  He had a favorite washcloth that he pulled around him at night and spent many hours napping in Grammy’s bathrobe pocket while she percolated through her early morning chores at the stove or sewing basket or writing desk.  For more than five years, Chippy lived this extraordinary life with our family.

Perhaps it was the onset of old age or maybe an incipient disease provoked the change in behavior, but around the fifth year, we began to notice that he was shunning interaction and was turning his tiny claws and teeth against us with purpose.  Eventually he became too difficult to handle and the decision was made that we would take him to a place where he had the best chance of living out the life he would have known, had I not saved him from the stone wall all those years before.  

I still recall the day when we drove down to Irvin Park at the bottom of Bloomington Hill.  (You have been there several times on our visits back to Curwensville…remember how we found the wild animal tracks in the mud and skipped stones at the edge of the river?)  Grammy was driving our periwinkle blue station wagon and Chippy’s cage was in the back while Uncle Jason and I were belted into our seats ahead of him.  We parked near the walking path and then carried his cage to a shady spot under the towering oak trees which reached 40, even 50 feet above us.  The air was filled with the sounds of his wild-growing nature…birds calling to each other and leaves rustling on the forest floor.  As hard as it was to open the lid, I knew, even at that young age, that whatever time he had left, he should have the freedom to spend it there.  

We were all crying and hoping that he would shun the open door, but almost immediately he raced across the path and up the nearest tree.  Higher and higher he went as though he were scaling the grandest draperies he had ever known.  And then to our utter disbelief, he flung himself off like an adrenaline-crazed base jumper to the earth below.  He crunched into a pile of dead leaves and lay immobile for a few moments before finally racing off into the woods and out of our view for the last time.        

The third time a charm, Chippy needed no rescue during the last chapter of our lives together.  He bounded off into the forest with the same joie de vivre that encompassed all his days with us, days which we were the better for.  And that’s why today, when you come to me with cupped hands around butterfly wings or squishy frog legs, I can’t protest or demand an immediate release of your captive treasure.  I want you to gather and relish and laugh out loud at all the life around you.  And then I want you to know when and how and why to send it out again.       

A Hymn for Dreamers

Help me, Lord, to hold my dreams,
the dreams I've dreamed in days gone by…
Help me Lord, to hold my dreams
with open hands to Heaven high.

Teach me, Lord, to trust the dreams
you've dreamed for me from ancient old…
Teach me, Lord, to trust that dreams
no matter time, can still unfold.

Remind me, Lord, to see this life-
these mother's struggles, sacrifice-
as once the dreams I prayed to live
and waited on Your love to give.

So help me, Lord, to hold my dreams
in cords of three as breath slips by.
Help me, Lord, while holding hands,
to turn their hearts to Heaven high.


For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.  
Plans to prosper you and not to harm you.  
To give you a hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29:11

First Farms: Great-Grandpa And The Red Dog Lane

To Matt, Josh & Lauren

Last time, I wrote to you about my earliest barn memory at the Durandetta farm.  (You can read it here.)  How as a small girl I watched in silent awe as my grandpa leaped from beam to beam above the cow stanchions and how my heart raced at the thought of him slipping and disappearing down, down, down forever.  

It’s interesting that my other earliest barn memory, this time at the Frisk farm (just a few miles from Grove City College where Daddy and I met) also involves a fear of falling down.  I was pretty young, maybe 4 or 5, because Great Grandpa Harry was walking with me.   He was left bedridden by a stroke when I was about 7 years old, so the memory comes from before then.  

I remember how he used to amble across the gravel driveway, from the house to the garage and then to the pony barn.  Back then, the farm's long lane was lined with a reddish stone that we called “red dog” and I recall going along, dragging the toe of my shoe to make scrapes as I helped him with his chores.  By the time I was born (I am the eldest cousin of 9 on the Frisk side), Grandpa Harry was a fixture but no longer the linchpin of operations on the farm.  His days in the coal mines were long over and he had retired from his work as township supervisor, staying mostly close to home except for trips to local swap meets and the occasional escape to Florida during a belligerent winter's quartering.  At that advanced grandfatherly age, he could afford the steady, measured pace that allowed little legs to keep up.  

In my memory, I’m climbing up the rough wooden steps of the pony barn with Grandpa Harry ahead of me.  My hands are grasping each board of the step in front because I’m afraid of the open drop to the concrete floor on my right side and I’m hugging the cinderblock wall to my left, leaning hard against it as I pull myself up to the granary floor above.  

Once there, my sense of fear was eased by the sweet smells of grain wafting up as Grandpa lifted heavy shovelfuls into the feed buckets.  I can smell that memory more than see it, as anyone who has experienced the syrupy brine of a bag of sweet feed or the dusty shrivel of a corn crib surely understands.  Today, when I walk into the feed store here in Perkasie, even though I’m 300 miles and 35 years away from that moment, I still feel as though I’m standing at the top of those stairs in the pony barn, watching as Grandpa Harry, clad in his dark olive green shirt smeared with tractor grease, rolls his shoulders over another shovel of oats at the horses’ dinnertime.

Carl Henry “Harry” Frisk had come into farming from a hard angle. He and his brother, Harold, were the sons of Swedish immigrants who settled in Illinois near the turn of the 20th century.  For reasons about which we can only speculate, the family became unwoven and their father left his young wife, then a mother of three.  With limited options for single parenting, Anna made the agonizing decision to cast off the bowlines that bound her to her boys and had them placed in a Lutheran orphanage in Genessee, New York.  She kept her young daughter Anethe with her, perhaps thinking she could manage to provide for a single child, if not all three.

The boys whittled away the years between the orphanage and apprentice shops and stints on the run.  They learned the expediency of a well-timed fist at too tender an age and later on, Harry took a stab at the amateur club fighting circuit in western PA with considerable success.  Eventually, the brothers were taken in by a well-to-do farmer in Mercer County, PA.  The Christley family provided them with a stable place to rest and grow and they began to put down roots for the first time in their lives.  Mr. Christley held the mortgage on a nearby farm which was headed to sheriff sale.  He turned the note over to Harry who was awarded half of the farm.  He then purchased the remaining half at the same sale for $265 and officially became a farmer on a 65-acre stretch of land.     

Younger brother Harold eventually married a lady named Helen and made his home a few miles down the road from his brother.  They never had children of their own but my mom remembers her great-aunt as doting and sweet.  I have the faintest memory of being in their house once.  Aunt Helen gave me a delicate bud vase of pink glass with golden stripes embossed around the edges.  You can find it in the china cabinet now along with 2 matching ones I found at a flea market some years ago.  

Harry's wife was Iva May.  They raised 2 boys; Robert (my grandfather) and Stewart.  IvaMay died of complications from diabetes at just 44 years of age so, of course, I never knew her.  Even Grammy only has the most fleeting memory of her.  She recently shared a story that she remembers hearing of how, as a toddler, she bit her grandmother’s finger while she was lying in bed.  Everyone was elated because Iva May, whose extremities had lost feeling by then, had felt the pain of it.  

Grandpa Harry then was a widower for much of his life and he spent those years helping run the farm that his oldest son Robert had taken over.  Before the stroke, he lived in an old mobile trailer that had been parked along a path in the woods behind the house.  I remember going up the steps and peering inside at the rows of purple and blue show ribbons that his quarterhorses had won over the years.   But a lifetime of building broad shoulders and callused hands was no match for the garrote of a clogged artery.   After succumbing to the choking hands of a tiny clot of blood, Grandpa Harry, who had spent decades of his life hoisting mountains of grain and manure and coal, was transferred from hospital to nursing home.  Like a granary bin in the pony barn, the trailer was cleaned out for the final time.  I felt both great sadness and deep affection when I was given a box of his ribbon trophies and I kept them in my bedroom throughout my childhood, always remembering my carefree shoe-scuffing days with Grandpa Harry on the farm.    

Great Grandpa lived for 7 years in the nursing home.  I have many memories of visiting him there and holding his hand while he sat in the geri-chair next to the window.  He would ask my dad about the price of coal as they both had spent a considerable portion of their lives in the business.  And he always quietly cried when we stood up to leave, the now-frail shoulders rolling over and over from the strain of welling tears.

He died when I was 14.  His funeral was the first of a loved one that I clearly remember attending.  It’s funny how the mind picks and chooses what it will attach to memory like a strip of Velcro.  Captured in the hooks and loops is the black sweater with brightly colored stripes running horizontally across the front that I wore that day and how I had to leave the viewing hour with my mom because I couldn’t contain my sobs any longer.  And it’s funny how smells and sounds often are more securely anchored than sights themselves.   I visited the farm countless times after Grandpa Harry left it, though I can’t recall the granary ever smelling like sweet feed again.

Uncle Jason and I continued to spend a summer week at the end of the red dog lane, just as you visit your grandparents and cousins in the mountains each August.  My stays on the Frisk farm are, in fact, the inspiration for much of what I teach you when we head for the open fields and cattail ponds of my old hometown.    

A few years ago, Grandpa Frisk died as well.  Mia had succumbed 18 months prior after a long and courageous battle with cancer.  I am so thankful that we made the long drive from Philadelphia to western PA three times so that your great-grandparents could bounce you on their laps and pose for a few squirmy photos, even though you’d only remember those dear folks from a handful of snapshots and my recollections.  

For the last 3 summers, I’ve made a point to drive out to the farm while in Grove City for my annual dinner with my college roommate.  Uncle Bob, who lives across the road, has been keeping up with the mowing and snow plowing and watching the pipes during the hardest freezes of the winter.  He’s even kept up the garden so Grammy and Grandpa can bring farm pumpkins to us for carving each October.  It’s been such a mix of emotions for me to travel back that long lane as I have done for forty years now, knowing that the barns and fields and lake remain, but Grandpa’s deep, capturing laugh won’t be greeting me at the door and Mia’s endless pots of coffee won’t be brewing their comfortable welcome.    

I always try to shutter in as much of my childhood’s memoir as I can while I’m there.  The old concrete steps at the back door where the cousins sat in age order.  The well cap which made for the perfect “safe” spot during a game of tag.  The red dog gravel in the lane where I had my first pony ride.  No matter how many times I run the camera battery down, I feel like I missed a piece of the puzzle and I can’t wait to go back again the next year to try and find it. 

The happy news is that we’ll be able to do just that.  After several years, Grandpa’s estate has been settled and Aunt Regina is moving to the farm.  She’s excited to get the fences fixed and the barns filled again with horses and goats and I’m hoping there will be chickens, too.  Best of all, she’s said we’re welcome to come for a visit and you can be sure I’ll take her up on the offer.  

And I won’t be a bit surprised if we happen to come home with a kitten or bunny or banty hen.  I can’t tell you how many times as a child I rode home from the farm with a box of fluffy contents on my lap.  But those are tales for other tellings…

Better Half

To Bob

February 12, 1994.  Exactly twenty years ago tonight, you pulled a fast one (I’m absolutely sure of the date because I called the GCC Alumni office and asked them to look it up in the archives.)  You snagged two hard-to-get tickets to the annual Faculty Follies show after overhearing that I was interested in going and then told me you’d meet me at the door.  So we’d have to sit together.  And perhaps it might look like we were a thing.  And maybe, just maybe, that would lead to another sit down.  At Rachel’s Roadhouse or Benjamin’s or The Iron Bridge.  (For the record, it was two weeks later at Rachel’s to celebrate my 20th birthday and that’s what I have always considered our first date.  But I digress.)  

Twenty years.  Exactly 7,300 days since we made that first public appearance among our friends and professors on Grove City’s campus and I’ve been your girl ever since.  It was fifteen days before my twentieth birthday.   So for more than half my life now, you’ve been my boy and there’s no question that it’s been the better. 

It’s not because it’s been the easier yin to a troubled yang or the worry-free fraction of the pie chart.  In many ways, it’s been the far harder and more exhausting half of my life.  On many days, I can’t believe we’re still standing.  The year of long-distance dating while I finished school and you started work.  The hard adjustments to early married life when I cried more than I laughed.  The 9 years of waiting for a baby.  The ultrasound that showed 3 beating hearts and nearly stopped ours.  The months of bed rest when you had to settle for being, well, just good friends ;-) The deflated income and the bloated grocery bill.  The days of minimal, minuscule, immeasurable sleep.  The skinny jeans and highlighted hair that gave way to the sweatpants and ball caps. (I might note that your hair, however, hasn't moved an inch in 20 years ;-)  

Then the quiet phone call that ended with the whispered word, cancer.  And the surgery and radiation and prayers for more quiet months between checkups.  And who could forget the chickens?  I think out of everything you’ve shouldered over the last 20 years, those 8 little fuzzballs might have been the most remarkable testament to your steadfast love.  I’m reminded every time I go to collect eggs of how very spoiled I am.     

Looking back on all of the twists and turns we’ve taken since that first sit down in Crawford Hall, I sometimes wonder if I had given you the playbill to our life together on that first night, would you have stayed for the show?  I think the answer is yes.  I think you would’ve said, “This is gonna be crazy, but let’s do it!”  ‘Cause I think you’re awesome like that.  And I think the next twenty years are probably going to make for an unbelievably better 2/3rds which will launch us into an incredibly better 3/4ths.  And it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if we decided to make a run at an astoundingly better 4/5ths.  

Thanks for blessing me as my better half and best friend.  I can’t imagine any other way forward.  

Love you most, 

Jen



Twenty Years in Review

The Grover Years:  Feb. 1994- May 1996

Whirlwind Months:  Engagement to Wedding in Aug. 1996

The Western PA Years:  Aug. 1996-Aug. 1999

The Eastern PA Years:  Aug. 1999-Oct. 2004

The Crazy Baby Years:  Nov. 2004-May 2007

The Crazy Kid Years:  May 2007 - present

Sinner's Prayer

When she came with lips trembling and head bowed, I knew she was gathering the courage to tell me something that was weighing like ore in her heart.  You saw it?  And the hand reaching into her pocket, fumbling to pull out the troubling slag.  That, too? 

Of course, you saw.  You knew.  But it was a surprise to me.  I wouldn’t have picked her to be the child to take something from a store, even something that was being swept up in a trash pile by the teenager working his after-school shift.  I would have assumed that was something the boys would dare to do.  But once she opened her little hand to reveal those glassy blue mounds of temptation, it all made sense.

Remember how she had wanted to spend her dollar on a bag of those vase gems?  And I had said, No, pick something more useful.  Like a coloring book or some stickers.   And she had obeyed.  But while I was looking at the gift bags along the wall at the other end of the store, she must have gone and disobeyed.  Just a handful, not a whole bag.  Just the ones that were sitting in a pile with the rest of the broom’s collection, waiting to be swept off the floor.  Yes, it’s easy to justify a trespass when the harm never leaves our own heart.  After all, her treasure was just their trash.   

But her heart is so very tender.  You know it well, better than I ever will.  How she can never hush the cry of her conscience any more than a lamb can suppress its bleating when the ewe draws near.  I’m thankful for her tenderness, but it worries me, too.  Because so often, she turns it against herself in the construction of that serpentine glass house.  Lines her missteps up like a row of rocks.  And puts a slingshot in your hand.  

You heard her confession.  Her begging me to take the gems back and quietly slip them into the dustpan so that no one need be the wiser.  You saw the struggle of hesitation.  The one she held back, rolling its smooth sides around in the palm of her hand, waiting to see if I would relent to leaving one behind.  Surely you felt her fear, the whispered dreading that while the store owner might never know her sin, you would never forget it. 

The anger and indignation I felt at those last 5 words were surprising to me, too.  How dare that ancient thug lay such a trap against a young child and try to wrest away the yet-pure trust she has in her Father!  What gall to hammer a wedge between her and the strong arms that ache for such a moment as this, arms that wait to draw her in and assure her that no matter the flaw, the mending has been made.  

Thank you for pressing grace-laden words to the front of my mouth so she could hear love first instead of reprimand.  You know it’s taken me years to raise them first when I’ve missed your mark and needed to be similarly comforted.  You know the locust years that wasted away while I fought to believe your love was really what I dreamed it might be, but feared that it was nothing more than a strong cup of condemnation as the world so often pours you out to be.  

Be sure your sins will find you out!

Never doubt, what goes around comes around!

The Lord never slumbers nor sleeps!  

Remember how long I tried to push the memory of my sins aside, hoping to put as much distance between myself and your disappointment in me as I could, feverishly constructing mileposts of approval that would keep me in your good graces and next in line for an answered prayer?  But in the deepest recesses of my heart, believing that the going around would eventually lead to a coming around meant that someday those black marks on my tally sheet would be at my heels again.  You’d have the sovereign right to call me to account.  And I’d have no recourse but to accept the stoning of your righteous anger.  I felt such fear of you through those dark years of my life.

Remember know how long I lived with my eyes always on the horizon?  Constantly checking on my failures.  Wanting them pushed from sight and yet paralyzed at the thought that once they dropped off the edge of my memory, I would look down to see them resurfacing from behind, demanding their dues, fearing that no matter how far something treads west in this world, it eventually finds its way back east again.   

But now I see how you sweep away our missteps, our failings and disappointments on a different plane, one that never bends itself back around to wound us again.  And I want that surface to be the first place she sees you, too, when she’s weak in her choosing or wavers in her stand.  I want her eyes to look up, in the way of David, who himself knew the depth of man’s transgressions and yet cast himself into your compassion with confidence.  He knew that his feet could no more reach the burial ground of his sin than his hands could stretch out and touch the foundations of Heaven’s walls.  He felt so loved by you during those dark years of his life.

It takes a righted heart to understand it and the battle of this life is the turning from the hiss and the howl that tell us otherwise.  It’s not earthly to believe in this absolute acquittal.   Daily, I need… she needs…all of us need your help to navigate the celestial routes you have mapped out for us, the higher roads that are loaded with your forgetting grace.  

Remind us, Father, that Jesus, in our place, endured sin's brutal assault, rendering our debt accounts closed.  Show us yours hands, flinging the heavy stones of our trespass off the edges of your memory and into the depths of unsearchable waters.  Wrap us in the peace of knowing that your greatest love overtakes our greatest need and lifts us forever above the shattered glass of the old man’s house.  

For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more...

Hebrews 8:12

Click here to listen to Casting Crowns' "East to West"

    

Auld Lang Syne

To Matt, Josh & Lauren,

Christmas 2013 is nearly a week in the wake now and the deconstruction process has already begun.  It seems that the kitchen was just now kindled hot over and over as I worked my way through a long list of cookie recipes, but already the empty tins and Tupperware containers are piling on the cold stovetop, waiting to be put away on the basement shelves.  We’ve already gathered the gift bags and bows, smoothed out the tissue paper that could be salvaged and flattened the multitude of cardboard boxes that are destined for the recycling bin.  The strand of lights around the door is half-burned out and Daddy decided against trying to fix them this year, so we’ve turned them off and the house looks a little less cheery against the wind.  Next week, when you return to school, I’ll begin the process of taking down the mantle nativity and send the wise men back east, or south as it may be.  The Santas will give way to the snowmen and the tree boughs will sigh and bow to relinquish their troves.  

At the beginning of the month, as I was assembling the yearly magic, I realized that there are so many efforts involved in creating Christmas that you’re not aware of yet.  The dozens of cards to write and send. The gift buying for teachers and the bus driver and the mail lady.  The lights that Daddy strings along the bushes at the front of the house and the decorations that I haul out from the basement and set up late at night while you’re deep in sleep.  

It’s not really important at 8 years old to appreciate it all.  I’m just delighted and somewhat confounded that you still write wish lists to Santa and believe that our elf has nanny cams throughout the house so he can accurately recommend you to the naughty or nice list.  My plan is to keep you in the shoals of Christmas strain as long as I can.  

In time, you’ll each discover the full scope of how Christmas unfolds in a home.  Some aspects will be jealously guarded and carried on.  Perhaps it will be a cookie tradition.  No matter how many dozens I’ve made, there still must be a batch of butterscotch oatmeal for me and a tin of Great-Granny’s lace cookies for your Daddy.   

Other traditions will seem an ill-fit to your families and you’ll store them away in the boxes of faded memories, coming across them when digging deep into a back corner of recollection.  In your Grammy’s house, we weren’t allowed to decorate ANYTHING until December 14th because Uncle Jason’s birthday was the day before.  Now, our tradition is to start putting up lights on Thanksgiving weekend.  I wonder what indispensable part of our holidays will draw to a close in your homes?  The angel food cake on Christmas eve?  Santa’s red wrapping paper?  

     

Today, I want to write about a few specific boxes of decorations that I faithfully bring up from the basement each year.  The ones that have extra-special meaning and a family history behind them.  One day, they’ll be divided among your homes and I’m delighted to think of their stories continuing to flourish on the tender branches that you’ll be adding to the family tree.   

*****

I keep most of my heritage treasures in the dining room.  Before you were born, I had spectacular dreams of turning that space into a museum of sorts, a place where I could display all my genealogy artifacts that I’ve collected over the years.  Then came triplets and the heirloom cherry table became a diaper changing station.  8 years later, it’s an art and Lego center, but I’ve managed to press my treasures around the edges of the room like a flower pinned flat between pages of a heavy book.  Some day I’ll write about the George & Martha plates from the mountains of central PA and the rounded glass cabinet from your Irish great-great-great aunt in Philadelphia.  But those are tales for another telling.  This letter is all about our Christmas antiquity.

  

The china cabinets are brimming with places to nestle all those shiny glass ornaments that have been handed down to me over the years.  Most of the brightly colored ones came from Granny Gunning when she was moving out of her house.  I group them by color:  blues with greens, reds with golds.  Granny showed me how to use an old wire to stack the pinks and silvers in a tree shape.  A lot of those balls have the old fashioned etching or flocking on them.  They’re starting to yellow and crackle, but I think when placed all together, they make a lovely display.  Granny also gave me a most special glass ball ornament.  Do you see that silver one lying on it’s side, sitting on the pink glass stand?  That belonged to your great-grandfather, Doc Gunning, when he was a child.  It’s coming up on 100 years old and is very heavy.  I wouldn’t dare try to hang it since it’s made of thick glass and the metal hanger is very loose. I handle that one with great care.

Bringing out these old pieces is like unlocking an old trunk for me.  Each December as I peel back the tissue paper, I get to revisit a little memory from my childhood and so often, one that is connected to my grandparents’ houses.  

After my Grandpa Durandetta passed away and we were cleaning out the attic crawlspaces, we reached the Christmas boxes.  A lot of things had missing or broken pieces or were just not salvageable.  Like the box of old fashioned C7 lights with the big, fat, colored bulbs.  I remember Grandpa stringing them on the bushes outside the front door and they would get so hot!  The wires were covered with a cotton braid and I always thought that was an accident waiting to happen.  But I couldn’t bear to see them thrown in the trash so I unscrewed the bulbs and later glued them into a wreath that I hang on the wall by the kitchen.  Likewise, I also rescued a box of tree ornaments that included Grandma’s yellow and gold masterpiece.  It used to be fashionable to take silk-covered balls and decorate them with elaborate stick pin and bead designs. I remember seeing it hang under her dining room chandelier each Christmas.  As a child, I fancied that it surely must have fallen from one of the wise men’s crowns.  

I also rescued a tiny vintage German angel and a blue plastic Jewelbrite from the box of ornaments that was headed to the trash.  A few years ago while I was browsing through a thrift store, I found a whole bag of the bright prisms….red, yellow and blue….and, of course, I had to buy them to go along with the single one I had from Grandma’s house.  Today, I hang them on the curtain in the window and they sparkle just like they did back in the 1960s. 

And what retro Christmas display would be complete without one of those ceramic trees with the plastic light-up bulbs?  Imagine my delight, while on a trip back to Grove City this summer to visit family, coming into possession of one of those trees that belonged to your Great Grandma Frisk!  I recall her having one on the kitchen windowsill and knew that my mom was now using it at her breakfast nook.  But I didn’t know there was a spare in the closet that no one had spoken for.  Today it’s on the little table just below the bulb wreath, casting about its cheer for another era to enjoy.  Grandma would be tickled, I’m sure.  

Over the years, Grammy has been handing down decorations to me as well.  When we first got married, she made sure I had a box full of ornaments for our tree and when she and Grandpa moved off the farm, she gave me a lot of the decorations that she no longer had room for.  See the Santa with the silky beard?  He’s the oldest and most special one I have.  My great-grandpa Frisk gave him to me on my first Christmas in 1974.  If you look back at old pictures of our trees, you’ll see him hanging on a center branch.   And those rainbow foil balls?  Grammy always hung one on our dining room chandelier.  I found these ones at a thrift store and had to add them to my collection.  

In the 1970s and 80s, it was popular for ladies to take ceramics classes and make holiday decorations.  One of Grammy’s friends made us that gaudy Frosty with his light-up rainbow belly.  We always kept him on the secretary desk near the front door and I was delighted when Grammy turned him over to me.  The elves came from the same lady and I remember them standing on the piano like little staring bookends, watching me practice my lessons.  

See the frosted reindeer ornament?  Grammy bought that set the year Uncle Jason was born.  And the little plastic trumpeting angels?  Those are some of the earliest ornaments that I remember hanging on the tree.  I’m sure I was allowed to handle them since they’re pretty much indestructible.  Today, I hang them alongside the Jewelbrites on the curtain.  And along the kitchen windowsill, I set up the stained glass nativity panels.  I was probably about your age when I made them and can still remember trying to decide which colors to use on the wise men’s robes. 

There’s one last collection of ornaments that I want you to know about.  They’ve all been purchased by me sometime in the last ten years.  They didn’t belong to anyone in the family tree and I don’t have any specific stories or memories to share about them.  Once I finish acquiring them, they’ll represent the 4 major heritages of your family tree: British, Northern Irish, Italian and Swedish.  As of now, I have 2 branches covered. 

The straw ornaments are traditional Swedish crafts.  Look carefully and you’ll see an angel, a pinecone, a heart and a bell.  I love that your Great-Grandpa Frisk was a farmer and spent so much time in the fields, among the stubble and folds of the earth.  Bended straw is a perfect nod to his Swedish roots.  

And the beautiful bauble ornaments are from Italy where artisans are famous for their skill in glassmaking.  There are ribboned blue and green hearts and gold candies with tassels and filigree.  I love that your Great-Great-Grandpa Durandetta was a quarryman and spent so many years cutting through the sandstone ridges of central PA, culling heavy blocks that found their way into some of the state’s most beautiful architecture.  Ornamental glass is a perfect nod to his Italian craftsman roots.  

By next year, I hope to have the collection complete with a set of tartan cloth ornaments to weave you in to your Atkinson Northern Irish roots and a set of Royal Doulton teacups to toast your Gunning British lineage.  

The best part of gathering these artifacts and memories, these stories of those gone on for you who have just begun, is that there is always more to discover, always another memento to stumble upon or a photograph that shakes a forgotten memory loose.  I love to think of the future and imagine where it will lead each of us.  But sometimes even more, I relish thinking on our past, honoring its significance in the construction of our family’s identity and remembering the beautiful, inimitable, vanward journey we’ve joined.  

Should auld acquaintance be forgot 

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

and auld lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear, 

for auld lang syne,

we’ll take a cup of kindness yet

for auld lang syne.