My whole life, I've loved sitting around listening to my older relatives talk about their childhoods and about our family history. It gave me a feeling I've never been able to describe as anything other than continuity, a feeling that I am a link in a very long chain steeped in incredible history. My favorite stories were always about things like where my family came from, and the times my dad and his siblings got into amusing and frightening scrapes as teenagers.
I have to wonder, what kind of continuity am I going to carry on with? The past couple years I've been adjusting to being in a new family, and trying to establish new traditions, and the newness of it all is kind of sad sometimes. I belong here, I know that, but I've not yet gotten to an intrinsic understanding of the melody of this new life. I don't expect any of this actually makes sense.
All of this is brought on by watching a TV show about Southern food. The sound of the southern accents--not even MY accent, they're people from Missisipi and Lousiana, not North Carolina--falls on my ears like a soothing waterfall and makes me so incredibly homesick. Add in the fact that my Geology teacher has this incredibly thick Utah accent, which gets on my nerves when he says things like "MAY-sure" instead of "measure", and I just really wish I could do some kind of cultural transplant or something.
I like it here. But could Utah please learn how to barbeque?
I loved listening to my grandmother talk about her and my grandfather's life. My grandfather used to live in this old farmhouse, and we got to go to it when I was younger, and it was so creepy. Just thinking that he used to run up and down the old staircase and bother his own parents under the roof was mind blowing--It was the weirdest experience. I think buildings have a way of reminding people of things. It's scary. I love it.
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