In a recent blog, I mentioned my grandmother on my mom’s side and a story she told me about my great-grandfather. This is a one of those old color-tinted photos taken of her in the early years of her marriage.
Another tale she told me when I was a kid related to her own childhood. The home where she grew up in New York City sat at the bottom of a slight hill. The house was actually at a crossroads. She could look out her front door and stare directly up a street that ended at the street where she lived. And in those days, even in New York, there were still a lot of horse-drawn wagons.
Occasionally, she said, the family could hear a horse coming fast down the street opposite her house. It never slowed down, got louder and louder as it approached, and then slammed into their front door with a terrible crash. Time after time, family members rushed to open the door only to find nothing—no horse and no marks on the door.
When I asked her what she thought about those experiences, she said she figured that long before her family moved in, a horse had actually smacked into their house, and what they heard were just echoes of the past.
I often ask myself how I would react if I continually had something like that happen. What about you?
Continuing the thread from a recent blog, I want to tell you about my great-grandparents on my mother’s side of the family. Born in the late 1800’s, they were a very devoted couple who spent a lifetime together.
Here they are.
My grandmother told me this story, one she experienced herself. So, just to clarify, this is about her parents.
She said she stayed with her father in his home when her mother, my great-grandmother, fell ill and went to the hospital. Well before dawn, she awoke to find my great-grandfather also awake and very agitated. He told her his wife, my great-grandmother, had entered their bedroom and said goodbye to him. It took some time, but my grandmother finally got her father calmed down and convinced him he had been dreaming. Then the phone rang. The hospital called with the news my great-grandmother had died.
This story rang so true for me over the years that I used a similar one in my book Sliding Beneath the Surface. Truth is not only stranger than fiction; it can also lay a very firm basis for the fiction we create.
Do you have such stories in your family history? If so, write them down so they won’t be lost. Share them with those other family members who might be receptive. To me, such things are a valuable heritage well worth preserving.
