"'...Yes, dear,'" he says with a hearty laugh.
My grandmother's youngest brother is ninety years old. He is the last surviving member of eleven siblings. I am in awe as he tells the story of when the family was moving to the family farm less than a mile from where we are sitting now. His mother was pregnant with my grandmother at the time of their move, which means my grandmother was likely born in that little house. They moved there in a covered wagon. He tells us the history he remembers of when each of his siblings were born and when they passed away. He tells us the history of the farmhouse we are in now, built in 1897 just two years before the little church next door was built.
It is such a joy to participate in the church service with them. Uncle Glen helps lead the service along with the traveling minister that comes to town, in order to deliver the sermon. The fullsize congregation of twelve members seems that any one of them could lead the service themselves and greets us warmly as guests. We see our names in the guestbook from the last time we visited. That was six years earlier for my mother and closer to twelve for my sister and I. At the service's conclusion, Aunt Ruth smiles when she pulls the two little children to the back of church so that she can start Sunday School. She looks to me and my sister, both of us over thirty years old now.
"Do you remember when I taught you in Sunday School?" she asks.
We both smile in reply and nod. We do.
My mother talks about how she moved from the family farm with her parents very early in her life. By the time she was four years old, she and her parents had already moved to neighboring Ohio so that her father could find steady work. She explains she always loved coming back to visit Michigan. Farm country. This is home.
We visit with other relatives we know and many we don't this afternoon. It is our family reunion. Not my mother's maiden family, my grandmother's maiden family. My great uncle says the prayer to bless the food and fellowship for the thirty some odd visitors there together. It dawns on me that he is the oldest living relative we have. What a blessing it has been to stay with him and Aunt Ruth these past few days.
We enjoy our time, but continue to move on the following day. We meet my father's brother for lunch and enjoy a night with my mother's friend who lived with us while Ellen and I were younger than five. My mother shows us the house she grew up in and the house she met my father at. He was simply sitting on the porch when she delivered mail to his house.
My uncle takes time out of his afternoon to show us the house his family lived in earlier in their lives. He explains that he was born in this house. It had been a terrible snowstorm and they could not go to a hospital. His father had walked a mile up a snow-covered beach to ask a nurse to come to the house. The nurse delivered my uncle right there at their home. He tells us of how his mother would take he and my father to the lake everyday to play till the sun went down.
My mother takes us by the house that she and my father had built when they got married. She describes that they participated in a program that provided housing for expectant mothers who needed help. They had two mothers live with them for the duration of their pregnancy before they moved to Texas. The second woman is the friend we visited and maintain contact with even today. When we visited her, she tearfully expressed such love and appreciation saying that the time she lived with us allowed her the stability to change her life forever. It was a wonder to see the love shared between her, my mother and my sister.
As we continue on, my mom showed me the plot that used to be the hospital I was born in. The hospital apparently had been torn down years ago. Nothing has taken its place since. We parked the car and I walked out into it. Reaching down and feeling the dirt, it is surreal to recognize that this is where life began for me.
Throughout my many experiences traveling with family and friends, my thoughts come back to my great uncle's saying: yes, dear. It is a simple acceptance of another's priority over self. There have been innumerable studies that examine what predisposes success in relationships: business, intimate, and otherwise. None of these capture the simple truth that I learned visiting an older couple that had lived so much life and almost all of it together.
It is our greatest joy to live for one another. It is our greatest service to put another person's life above our own. It is our one true calling: to live and love and serve one another. To live this simple truth is to find the greatest joy to be had in this lifetime.
I am grateful for this lesson and hope to find ways to live its truth.
#boothabroad #almosthome
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