Tree

It's a brisk Friday morning and today's Five Minute Friday word prompt it tree, which makes me think of climbing trees, but it's far too cold for that  (and I'm also far too old for that). Right now, the trees are shedding their leaves faster than the rakes can keep up with. Palm trees are blowing in Haiti, where two friends are wrapping up a week of service, but another tree comes to mind this morning.


My mother is working on her family tree. It's my family tree, too, but she's the one doing the exploring, the legwork, the climbing. I feel a disconnect from the tree, since I have only vague recollections of my mother's sisters and mother, and I don't remember her father at all as he died when I was an infant. Beyond those generations, the names and faces are just people from another time and place.

My mother's interested in connecting the branches between family members, recording births and deaths, and putting siblings with the right parents. More interesting to me are the story tidbits that sometimes come out when I ask about her progress or when we teach her how to scan another unsmiling face from a 100-year-old photograph. It's the stories that help these ancestors of mine come to life and become more than a photograph. Stories of families not visiting or communicating, husbands keeping their wives sequestered from their families, sons moving back to the farm when their fathers died, losing the farm in the Great Depression, moving families to where the work was ... Some stories are true, some are rumored to be true like the story a great-uncle and his buddy (who later married my great-aunt) who supposedly got two girls pregnant and then shirked their responsibility by vanishing to Nebraska.

While I'm really not interested in who begat who or who is my seventh cousin twice removed, I do enjoy the stories that make the people. I'm always up for a good story and when one emerges from my family tree, all the better.