Voices from the past

Perhaps its in my blood... this inclination for journaling, handed down by two great great grandfathers whose journals I've read. A journal kept by Loren Webb during his time serving in the Civil War (and for some time after) is now housed at the Firelands Historical Museum in Norwalk, Ohio. I've been there and paged through it, oh so gingerly and reverently. His description of the Battle at Shiloh is written such that I think I can hear the guns in the distance. I have a complete transcription of his journal along with transcriptions and/or scans of many other documents either written by him or pertaining to him.

Loren must have fancied himself as a journalist as he wrote accounts of his war time experiences for his hometown newspaper. Indeed some of his letters to friends and family showed that he was very skilled and creative with words.


Journals kept by Martin M. Hester documented the labors on the family homestead, interspersed with notations about the family and visitors and about church meetings, who preached the sermon and the biblical text cited. A great deal of it would have seemed routine at the time, the butchering of livestock, tending to crops and animals, sawing of lumber, the number of pounds of butter sold at market and so on. Yet in our day, we are so far removed from the source of our food that it all seems fascinating to me. Not only that, but the way of life is so distant as well... travel by carriage in the dead of winter, going to town to send a telegram, "refrigerating" food by cutting ice from the river for the ice house.

Loren Webb's daughter Maybelle Lorena married Martin Hester's son Finlay to become my great grandparents on my mother's side of the family.

I will be sharing excerpts from their writings in later blog entries. Here is a photo of the Hester family homestead, the brick portion being the original building. The bricks were made on location, but more about that later. Note that there are four chimneys, providing a fireplace for each room. Descendents of Martin still live here.

News of the day

Millions of us sit in front of flickering TV sets every evening watching the news, trying to understand, to make sense of things in some way. Yet as Frederick Buechner points out, it's good to think over the news of our day:

"...the unextraordinary, commonplace events of each day as they come along we tend to let slip by almost unnoticed. That is, to put it mildly, a pity. What we are letting slip by almost unnoticed are the only lives on this planet we're presumably ever going to get....

"...It's all apt to happen so quietly and on so small a scale we hardly realize it's happening. Only an unanswered letter. A phone conversation. A tone of voice. A chance meeting at the post office. An unexpected lump in the throat. Laughing till we cry. But those things are what it's all about. These things are what we are all about....

"Maybe there's nothing on earth more important for us to do than to sit down every evening or so and think it over.... The news of our day. Where it is taking us. Where it is taking the people we love. It is, if nothing else, a way of saying our prayers."

(Quoted from Beyond Words, 2004)

Numbering our days

I've been thinking about writing a blog for some time now and was hindered by thinking it was going to be more complicated to get one set up. I was spurred on by a couple of friends who have recently set up one. My best friend from graduate school is currently chronicling her "journey" to Bethlehem, Palestine, where she is spending several weeks providing music therapy services to children traumatized by the conflict there.

Then this past Friday I heard Erin Gruwell tell the inspirational story of Freedom Writers, how she used literature and writing to inspire the most challenging and least-likely-to-succeed students in her school to not only to overcome their horrific circumstances and graduate, but go on to college.

On the value of telling our daily stories: "We bring our years to an end like a sigh......So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90: 9, 12 ESV.

A quote from one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner in Beyond Words....

"It is a mark of wisdom to realize how precious our days are, even the most uneventful of them. If we can keep them alive by only a line or so about each, at least we will know what we're sighing about when the last of them comes. "