Our stories last longer than we do

So much for that warm weather we had last week. It only took a few hours for the snow to cover the scraggly grass. The fat flakes are still drifting down as I type. The good thing about March is that the snow won’t last, and the temperatures are unlikely to slide into the negative numbers.

Grandson Jacob, turns 10 today. It seems like yesterday that he was a wiggly newborn. Soon he was demanding “nummies” which turned out to mean he wanted syrup for his waffles. A blink of the eye later he was crouched in a refrigerator box hiding from monsters. He was blessed with a baby brother to go with his big sister. For some reason he delighted in licking the baby’s head. The baby didn’t mind. In the summer he turned flips on the trampoline and climbed the chain link fence so he could visit the neighbors. He caught lots of fish with his Pappy, his dad’s father. He became an expert on sharks, then gave up the sharks for dinosaurs. He plans to be a paleontologist when he grows up. 

Towards the end of the month one of my cousins turns 62. He is an only child. When his family visited our farm we would explore the barn and fields. We dragged  home treasures from the dump. He dared me to jump out of the hay mow into a pile of hay that didn’t get baled. We both jumped and neither one was injured. He married and had a couple of kids. He joined the army and was stationed in South Korea for a time. Somewhere along the way he got remarried. He left the army. He has held a number of different jobs and plays Santa at Christmas time. I don’t know what he plans to be when he grows up or if he plans to grow up at all.

If someone was going to summarize your life in a paragraph, what would it say? Would it tell of accomplishments? Organizations? Maybe you won a Nobel prize? Did you make the best chocolate cake ever invented? Or would it say that you lived your life the best you knew how even though it was riddled with poor decisions? Would it say that you hid from monsters in a refrigerator box?

Every family has stories. My grandmother told of walking behind the plow, breaking up clods with her bare feet. She would steal ice from the ice house in summer. Once, she had to go hitch up the horses so her father could go to the next farm over to use their phone to call the doctor when one of her siblings was ill. Another time she was doing dishes at her mom’s when one of the nephews kept shoving her in the back. Finally getting tired of it, she grabbed him by the hair. The kid got a haircut the next day and thought it was because Grandma had stretched his hair. Her stories gave us a peek at a different life.

The family tales are told and retold so often that it seems like we remember the actual event. That is why my brother, Michael, can remember Grandma almost tipping the tractor over even though it happened years before he was born.

Stories are important. When we tune people out because we have heard the same story one too many times, we are depriving ourselves of the details that we may not have caught the first thousand times we heard the tale. It is the stories we tell to ourselves that enable us to say, “That’s not who we are,” in times of tragedy. By denying that we are, indeed, capable of great evil, we reinforce the qualities we cherish in each other and ourselves.

Just like the snow on the ground, the stories we tell will not last forever, but they often last longer than we do.