They Will Know Us by Our Stories

One of my favorite National Public Radio shows is “This American Life.” It is storycatching, pure and simple. Yesterday, in the car, I came in in the middle of a story: an elderly woman relating time spent in a Louisiana neighborhood some years ago, in which her and her husband’s neighbors were a gay couple. They were, she said, the best of neighbors in a bigoted neighborhood. They were kind and helpful and reliably dependable whenever anyone needed anything. It was just who they were, and the fact of their sexual preferences became unimportant. She doubts that even today a black family would be accepted into that neighborhood, but gay people are welcomed wholeheartedly. She caught that story of an ordinary neighborhood in a place in time, carried it into the future, and told it back out.

Storytelling, the human experience passed down from family to family, friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor. It transforms us. “My story is myself; and I am my story. This is all you will know of me; it is all I will know of you. This is all that will survive us: the stories of who we are, the ways that people speak our names and remember something we did, an event we lived through, a clever story we were known for, or hopefully, some wisdom. They are mostly gone now－grandparents, aunts and uncles－and you and I will soon be gone, too. What is left of their lives, and what will be left our ours, is story” (Christina Baldwin: Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story).

What, you may ask, does storytelling have to do with the garden, and thereby this blog about the garden? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I knew when I left my soil and plants garden in North Carolina and moved across the country, following the highways and byways through the taller-than-an-elephant’s-eye cornfields and across the windblown plains and sagebrush deserts and over the soaring mountain ranges, I was going in search of a different garden to live in. I have told you the story of that other garden, now listen as I catch a new story.

Storycatching and storytelling. My aching desire to write more story fluctuates between hopelessness and hot burn. New gardens take time to come to fruition. There are false starts and discouragements; and there are triumphs, however small. There are times that I feel I am delusional to think I can write anything; and times that I kick ass－if only in my own mind. 

I asked my mother this week if she knew where her name came from. “Yes,” she said. “There was a socialite in my [Tennessee birth] town name Stella Jo, I expect it was spelled like that. My mother liked the name.” She said the socialite was in the newspaper a lot, or maybe she said she probably was. I wouldn’t have thought her mother read a newspaper, but our stories include a lot of could haves and guesses to fill in blanks; and that is okay. It’s her story and who am I to question or correct. (Now that I have written that, I may get more story, though!)

“My father wrote it on the birth certificate as ‘Stella Joe,’ with an “e” on the end. In school, there was also a Stella Mae, and we were both called Stella. So I changed my name to one word, Stellajoe, so there would be no mistake. Later, when asked what my middle name was and when I replied that I didn’t have one, I was told that everyone has a middle name. When I married I began to use my maiden name initial in my signature.” Perhaps I knew and had forgotten that my mother’s first name does not match her birth certificate. We forget a lot of stories.

This is part of my mother’s story. And of mine and my sisters’. And now I have written it down in the garden.

I went on a cemetery tour on a rainy yesterday. It was not my beloved historic Oakwood in Raleigh for sure. But all cemeteries are filled with stories. Some are widely known, most are not. The docent passed along some of the known stories. Like the Martin family: lumber mill owners and the area’s largest employer. Until the mill burned down and caused a personal and local economic collapse. Frank and Mellie Martin (family of one of the victims of the Centralia Wobbly massacre－her relative’s grave visited by President Warren G. Harding as he passed through Centralia) died within three months of each other in the early 1940s. Their story links the stories of two families. And storytellers pass it on. Two fir trees, planted next to their graves, have grown side-by-side to great height, telling the Martin's story of love for trees and each other. My friend Phillip is restoring their home, lost to them after the mill fire, and telling about them; and so their story continues.

“Story shifts us into connection when only moments earlier we felt isolated” (C. Baldwin).

I admit to a semi-love of FaceBook. FaceBook has been vilified by many; even by those who use it. But each time a friend, or even a stranger, posts something on their wall or responds to another’s post, it is storytelling. Like hieroglyphics scratched into cave walls, it tells us in millions and millions of snippets who we are. Each time someone reads it, it is storycatching.

I have kept a journal off and on from my first pink diary with its tiny lock and key, to the volumes one upon another written weekly for the last dozen years and a few from years before, to the past two and a half years of this blog. I have often asked myself why, and the answer is to know myself, and to leave my story behind when I am gone. Like Christina Baldwin, maybe paying attention to myself is my job, telling my story is mine to claim, and maybe my life will be different if I do. I no longer ask that question.

(This photograph tells one of our family stories; let me know if you want to hear it.)

And so, an invitation:

Write something. Write something now. Or tomorrow. But soon. Just a sentence. Look out the window; what do you see? Do you see the utility line? or the pigeon sitting on it? or the red-leafed tree hanging over it? or the pair of Reeboks flung over it? or the clematis vine climbing the guy wire? What you see tells something about you. When you write it down or tell it to someone, you share your story, with yourself and maybe with others. Send me a sentence (gigi.pnw@gmail.com), or leave it in a comment on this post. I want to know you. As I want you to know me.