I love being close to my grandparents. I have three that are still living and I am fortunate enough to be able to spend significant time with all of them. Two grandmothers that impart knowledge on many subjects from cooking to values to life lessons and more, and one grandfather that imparts knowledge on pretty much everything except cooking!
I’m so thankful for the conversations I have with all three of them, but I frequently get to sit down and listen to my poppa talk about his life and his family. Through his stories I feel like I know my great-grandparents in a way. My great-grandfather was in WWI and spent his life farming; my great-grandmother, well I see her as kind of ballsy, really. She drove a car, something which my great-grandfather only tried about once and decided it wasn’t for him.
She was the third-eldest, and eldest daughter, of thirteen children and helped raise them all. I recently mentioned to Poppa that I would like to know more about his mother, the sort of woman she was and what she spent her life doing, aside from raising children and farming. He’s writing much of it all down and said he would focus on her a bit more. I love learning about all the woman in my family, past and present. As a young woman I think it’s important to know the other woman around you and to listen to them — what they say now might not make much sense, but as one grows older, some of that advice, or seemingly random things they’ve said, begins to make sense in a way you would not have expected.
These talks with Poppa are times that I treasure so much, and always will. I hope my own children have the sort of relationship with their grandparents that allow them to learn about the past and their family history. I think, though, that I have an abnormally large interest in that sort of thing, probably because I am so interested in history in general and find any little tid-bits I can gather to be fascinating.
This week I’m going to have to visit The Howick Historical Village and get a history fix. And now I know what my third Bachelor of Arts subject is going to be.
