Thoughts on Family and Place, aided by Theraflu

I love reading historical fiction. Once my kids are tucked away and my hubby is fast asleep, I love pulling out a good book and curling up with it for hours. Sometimes I read until 2 or 3 in the morning. One of my few talents is speed reading, so when I pick up a book I usually don't put it down for a good two hours and I have finished it completely.

As a little girl, I would wait in the darkness of my room each night, until I knew my parents were either in bed or in the living room watching a movie. I would take out my flashlight and hide under the covers with a new book. It didn't take long for that little tent to dissolve around me as I lost myself on an island filled with pirates and hidden treasure or entered a little parlor in New England with my four favorite sisters. My mind would race with the literary worlds I entered, I would become part of the story to such a degree that once I finished a book my heart would still be racing and I would often fall asleep dreaming of the place I had read of. I finished most children's books, like Nancy Drew or The Boxcar Children in forty-five minutes or an hour. Soon I started looking for something bigger to chew. It didn't take long before I found J.M Barrie, Charles Dickens, Louis May Alcott, Mark Twain and the like. I fell in love with characters. I thought about them all day, especially those that had to endure extreme trials, like Nicholas Nickleby and Smike.

Not much has changed since then. I still read as I did back then. My whole mind engages the page and I lose all sense of the real world around me. I love historical fiction in particular because of the lost world it preserves. I cry throughout Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind and Jane Austen's Persuasion. I marvel at the extremity of life in Moby Dick. How many intricacies of life have been lost through modernization? The same daily rituals repeated for a hundred years, lost in the turn of one century. It takes my breath away. Whole families and whole traditions, lost from routine but preserved for our imaginations.

Books about family are especially important to me. Books about places with families that have lived there for centuries, touch my heart. How many generations stay in one place these days? More often then not, children are always growing up and moving away, searching for something bigger and better.

I am always grateful that my grandparents were brave enough to sail away from an island corrupted with the evil of socialism. But not a day passes that I don't dream of the land that is part of my blood. Can we ever fully know ourselves without the land we belong to? That questions is foremost in mind at all times. Place and belonging. Family and land. "Home is where the heart is." I love seeing that phrase stitched on little country crafts. If I could stitch one it would say, "Land is where my soul is."

This past Sunday I went to the beach with J, the boys, and my parents. The same beach I would ramble on as a child and the same beach we baptized our boys on. I watched my eldest son splash in the water with complete joy and abandon. My father leaned over him and showed him the clumps of floating seaweed and said, "this is where the little shrimp live." He took one out and shook it to see if any small shrimp would fall out. I remembered how many times he had done that with me. Dripping salt water from my every pore, sticky swimsuit clinging around my brown skin, and waiting breathlessly as my Dad shook out the seaweed and then watching for those small shrimp to fall back into the ocean.

Even if it is only for a time, I am strangely fulfilled to see a cycle of life repeat itself in those little childhood rituals. My family can slowly welcome the new generation with old habits and traditions, introduce them to this place we have belonged to for fifty years, and perhaps my children will make new imprints for their own children to see one day. This is a new history I would live to read. A new time I long to write about and preserve.