Creative & Durable

We all start out with family traditions.  Heritage.  A familiar way of doing things, but then as each generation grows up and ages, they put their own slant on those “old” ways.  Some generations will make only slight adjustments that are barely discernable.  Other generations will totally re-vamp them or dismiss them as “old-fashioned” and not carry them forward.  Some generations will even make up their own new traditions to carry on.

Traditions or “our heritage” is affected also by the times, be they economic, political, medical, religious or just plain geographic.  We move about so much these days that it’s difficult sometimes to carry on those family ways.  Sometimes the moving and changing of their environment even causes some to reach back to those days of doing things as they were meant to be done for some connectivity to their roots.  They try to recapture the lost feeling of family and perceived “better” times.

In our own journey we have touched all those variations.  We have brought many of those traditional ways into our lives over the years.  Some were always trusted and comforting.  Some became so after trying what we perceived as a “better alternative” and finding out that they weren’t.  Sometimes we found out that the new and the different  didn’t always mean that it was better, or easier, or even the same. 

With our own subtle variations we become “Traditionally Twisted”!  I found an article this week while going through the Mother Earth News website that I wanted to share with you.  It shows that even if we are uprooted and even under the penalty of the law, we will always keep the best and/or the necessary to provide for our families and their welfare.

“A Creative and Resourceful Grandmother During the Industrial Revolution

7/27/2011 3:07:25 PM

By the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors

This story is from Ann Harlan, submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear.

My maternal grandmother and grandfather grew up in Kentucky on farms. They came North during the Industrial Revolution and my grandfather took a job near Detroit driving a bulldozer. This was around the 1930s. My grandmother was a busy mother of seven.

She maintained a garden in her city lot while Papaw worked long hours. When pheasants would come to eat from the garden, she would raise up the window (just a bit) and shoot them from inside the house (because it was illegal to fire a gun in the city limits). Then, in a little while, she would take a basket out to the garden and carefully collect the pheasants and put produce on top so no one would see her.

She was a very creative and durable woman, despite having heart damage from rheumatic fever. As a transplanted Choctaw and Southerner, she coped with the tremendous cultural changes in very creative ways – maintaining her knowledge of good use of the land and its resources.”

I like to think of my self under those terms…Creative and Durable.  I guess time and perception will be the judge on that.  But I think I’ll take that title for myself and for my husband.  It could be our mantra and our inspiration. It could be the top rung on our ladder that we are always striving for. 

Enjoy your day everyone and don’t forget to keep it….Traditionally Twisted!