The picture above is the view from my sisters deck, which I look out at, as I write this. It is uncommonly beautiful here this time of year. Those mountains are the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. You can see at the top left of the picture how the mountains are rising, higher and higher. That’s where the Blue Ridge are, Shenandoah National Park, and Skyline Drive. It is cloudy today, as you can see, and warm and muggy. I can hear thunder in the distance, and it echoes off the mountains.

I am removed from the crazy world I’ve been in for the last couple of months. It is peaceful here, thought provoking. It is also humbling. It’s like when you are at the ocean, and reminded of your tiny but important place in the world because the expanse of the ocean is so vast and beautiful. Here it is the massiveness of the mountains towering around you that does the same. These mountains are not like the Rockies, not jagged, not high enough to have tree-lines with just rock above. But high enough, to make you sit back and catch your breath, and put you in your place.

Before my mother died, actually long before, we, her daughters, and asked her many times to write out her life history, because we felt it was remarkable, and she was remarkable, and that we’d like to be able to pass it along to our own children, so they would know where they came from. Mom worked on it from time to time, over the last 15 years of her life. In the 6 months or so before she had her stroke, she was working diligently on it. She would go to the library and look things up, and write, and make notes. She was 93 when she was doing this. That alone is a remarkable feat.

My sister who took care of her for the later part of her life, found all her notes, and all that she had written, and has compiled it into a biography, which is actually an autobiography, since Mom wrote most of it, but my sister had to edit it, and try to decipher my mother’s 93 year old handwriting.

My sister also has done our genealogy back a long long ways, on my mother’s side. There are very good family records, and she found a lot on Ancestry and another site. She found out that one family, the Redfields, could be followed back to John and Priscilla Alden and the Mayflower. I had also followed it a long long time ago, and given her one branch, of my mother’s fathers family, that went back to the year 1010 in England, and ending perhaps in France, that I got from Ancestry.  That branch had ties to one of the founding fathers of the state I now live in, Connecticut.  So we have this huge compilation of where we come from.

I don’t think this is unusual. I’ve heard that if you go back 7 generations we are all connected. It is fascinating, however, to actually trace your own roots, to see the names of your great-to-the-power-of-8 grandparents. Where they were born and died, and when.

Most of my mother’s ancestors moved to the midwest of the US, to Indiana, in the early 1800’s. I always think that those people, were so incredibly brave. To leave the settled part of the country, the east coast, and venture 1000 miles west, at a time when there were no roads, no infrastructure, no nothing. Outposts and trading posts, and some really rich farmland. So they went, and struggled and created a life out of wilderness.

So so gutsy.

Anyway, that’s where my head it at. Grateful for those that came before me, so that I could have the wonderful life I have. Grateful for the strong hearts and minds that they passed down to me. And which I took for granted for much of my life. When I look at the things I think I “struggle” over, I have to remember them.  And have a little perspective on my life.

Love and light everyone.