"One's own hearth"

My wife and I … have purchased a little land upon which we can raise enough food — and we have built a house upon it. We are going to live by ourselves. I can work that land myself. Our Johan and Arend Jan and Jenneken are paying for that land from their earnings. Now they say we have our own home, and my wife and I are happy to have it. There is nothing better than having one’s own hearth — isn’t that true? … My wife is very happy.

I don't know the woman, but I know the story that's somewhere behind this note from an old letter--or some variant thereof. The woman who posted this on her blog got interested in family when someone, somewhere, asked her if she knew how an ancient grandmother of hers once learned how to bead from the Sioux neighbors she had when she was a girl way out in South Dakota long, long ago. Or maybe this: someone told her how a 19th century, great uncle lost a wife and two children to the Spanish Flu in 1918. The woman who posted that paragraph was amazed--more than that, she was shocked--that she didn't know. So she started reading whatever she could get her hands on.

Maybe an 80-year-old aunt or grandmother told her that her sister in Indiana had some letters that a great-great-great grandpa wrote back to family in the old country. Maybe that's where it started. That old aunt told this woman that she herself had never read those letters but had once heard they were kind of fun, if you're interested in that kind of thing. She'd never been, she'd said.

That's how the woman who stumbled on this paragraph found it, then posted it, just one paragraph of many that left her stunned with the knowledge of what she had never known about herself. All of a sudden, unpredictably, she was fascinated by an unraveling story that was uniquely hers, a strange and varied chain of events that had somehow led to be her being who she was, and where and how. 

Most everyone who reads these words and that paragraph at the top of the page have similar stories--blood relatives 150 years ago or so who lived the American Dream as innocently as the man who wrote those words back to his old country relatives: "There is nothing better than having one's own hearth."

The truth is, this old-country granddad, now at home in a new world, never really wanted much more than he had once he was self-sufficient in a house of his own on land of his own, at the foot of his own hearth. 

"Such humble beginnings," she must have told herself when she read that paragraph, "such incredibly humble beginnings."

"History," Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again." 

That kind of knowledge is humbling, as is faith itself, instruction for the soul. 

Here's Joyce Sutphen from this morning's Writer's Almanac.

Grandma Clara
By Joyce Sutphen

About noon she arrived in her blue-and-
white Bel Air by Chevrolet, in which she
did not see the USA but only

the road from her house in town to the farm
she built with her husband, who died as soon
as they retired, and that is why she came

each day—just to have something to do, to
help us with the work we had inherited
from her: the strawberry fields, gardens,

apple orchards, and grapevines, rhubarb stalks,
potato patch, rows of sweet corn; wild plums,
and gooseberries—and all those fields of com

and oats and hay, pastures too, above the
house and woods or down by the meadow where
the green grass grew. Who would not return to

such a place? I see her walking across
the lawn in her straw hat, hoe in hand,
ready to chop away whatever weeds

dared grow between the perfectly mounded
hills of potatoes, those rows that would feed
us all through the cold white winter when she

would come less often though we would see her
every morning in the back of church—
praying, no doubt, for the whole crop of us.