I’m here with my grandpa, and we’re staying with my grandpa’s sister. Which makes her my great aunt, I think. I’m hearing all about the truck Grandpa flipped driving across a bridge too fast, the one-room school house that used to be right where that tree is now, the house where my mom learned to ride a bike, the river Bud almost drowned in, and the barn that started on fire from a spark in the hay.
The concrete’s turning back to gravel, the telephone poles are reverting to their original state as trees, the sound of car engines is giving way to the clip-clop of horse hooves, and everyone’s hair is getting curlier as I listen. There’s more time in this world. There’s more black and white pictures. There’s more radios and less televisions. There’s more ice cream. McDonald’s hasn’t taken over the world yet.
I’m learning more of my family history.
It’s an amazing thing.
Today the world seems older than it did yesterday. Today I laugh at the people building their fancy houses, polishing their shiny cars, mowing their expansive lawns, because fifty years from now, all people will say about them as they drive past is, “Oh, yeah, so-and-so’s used to live here, but then they died.”
I talk with all these white- and gray-haired folks, and I am in awe. They’ve eaten so many more meals than I have, seen so many more sunrises, drunk so many more cups of water, sneezed so many more sneezes. I am not very old.
And that reminds me of Africa. (They don’t really have to be related. Everything reminds me of Africa.) I look out at the cornfields here, I think about the cornfields at home, and I remember the cornfields in Africa. I think about our farmers and their farmers. Our great aunts and their great aunts. Our school houses and their school houses. Our history and their history.
And I wonder what people will say fifty years from now.
What stories the kids who call me their great aunt will hear. Which river I will almost drown in. Which truck I will flip. Which spot of land they will have to drive past to be able to say, “Oh, yes, Rebecca lived here, but then she died.”
I wonder about my history.
I wonder about us being so small, about us being so many, about our lives being so short - and I wonder how God keeps track all of us. I wonder how it’s possible that we don’t all look alike to Him, sort of like when I look in the dirt at the ants. I wonder how He keeps us apart. How He never confuses me with some curly-haired chick named Rebecca who lived 1,387 years ago.
The more I learn, the more in awe I am.
And then a couple nights ago, Grandpa told me about a video he’d seen of NASA pictures.
The Earth from the top of a mountain.
The Earth from the height you have to reach to be an astronaut.
The Earth from the moon.
The Earth as a dot in the solar system.
The sun as a dot in the galaxy.
The galaxy as a dot in a thousand galaxies.
History. Ages. Millennia.
Eternity.
And I am grateful for my family. My history, my heritage, all the who’s I came from. However insignificant it might be in the grand scheme of things. I am blessed, and I am grateful. I’m even glad it started in is-that-a-part-of-Kansas Nebraska . . . And I’m hoping there’s a lot more red African dirt involved before I die.
