We all have them.
Memories tied up in wood, or glass. Physical artifacts containing invisible family stories of the people whose blood pulses through our veins. Stories that tie us to the past, but also give us vision and courage for the here and now.
Such an item is my mother’s blue glass bowl.
I love this bowl. I love its bright color. I love the way its shape captures the free movement of the wind in the air.
My mother loved this bowl also. In her final days of life, she kept it where she could see it; on a bookshelf in her apartment, and she often told me how she got it.
Grandma Vance (her mother) had purchased it for my mother on one of the trips out West Grandma and Grandpa made, after they retired.
Grandma and Grandpa Vance were farmers.
My mother and the rest of their children grew up on that small farm, in Charlevoix County in Northern Michigan, miles from the nearest town (East Jordan).
Being farmers, Grandma and Grandpa were tied to the farm. They had milk cows, then later, Herefords, that needed constant care. Plus, there was everything else on the farm to tend to. For decades, Grandma and Grandpa never got away for longer than the time it took to get to church or weekly choir practice.
In their retirement years, after they gave the farm to their son Bryce and his wife Virginia, Grandma and Grandpa took advantage of their freedom. They bought a little travel trailer that they could pull behind their blue Ford sedan. They traveled to every one of the contiguous 48 states. When they couldn’t find a campground to stay at, they parked overnight in gas station parking lots.
I like to think of the two of them, free of the farm: my grandfather, who had never known much beyond farm life after his father pulled him out of school in the sixth grade; my grandmother, who had migrated from Ohio to Michigan with her family as a girl, but who had seldom left Charlevoix County since. I like to think of the two of them, cautiously driving thousands and thousands of miles across America, looking with wide-eyed amazement at Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon and the California redwoods.
When I see that blue bowl, with its restless spikes of glass stretched into the air, I can hear the winds of the American West, blowing an invitation: Come. You’re never too old, too stuck, or too broke. Adventure beckons. Come, follow the wind and see where it takes you.