the long now

I guess like most Americans—North Americans—my heritage is a bit ambiguous. I talk to my Grandmother via email pretty often—cool, right— and lately she'd expressed interest in writing a memoir of sorts. I, of course, encourage this because a.) I am a geek and b.) enjoy a good story and trust me, my Gramma's got a good one! Plus, I relish the thought of my handsome Grandparents as young people. Well, it came up that that my Grandmother has in her possession a memoir of sorts written by her Great Aunt and I, of course, begged her to share. I got a photocopy in the mail last night and stayed up later than I should have reading it. Nick was in disbelief saying that it sounded like something out the westward expansion chapter of a history book and it's true. Reading about the childhood of my Great-Great-Great aunt, born in 1891, traveling the western country in a wagon, homesteading and watching siblings suffer horrible affiliations is pretty unbelievable, but it's oddly affirming. I've spent the past decade, plus, in the east and now, the midwest, and as much as I love the east, I grasp on to stories of the west and, it's sort of larger-than-life, mythology. Perhaps I am motivated by distance, but perhaps it's deeper, perhaps it's the innate knowledge that my namesakes traveled this country scraping together a life and I too, travel about this country, minus the wagon, doing the same.