A Story for the Making

I stood peering through the darkened glass windows, wondering why this place, of all places, had to close as well. I could make out the old counter and the worn wooden floor. Behind, hundreds of little boxes lined the wall, decades old, once home to countless fixings, hooks, fasteners, handles, and rubber bands, each unique in their use and worthy of their place. Rickards of Ludlow opened as an ironmonger at the top of the high street in the mid-1800s. Over time, it became the one place you could find whatever you needed to repair almost anything, a treasure trove of knowledge for mending and homemaking. And now, it lay empty and neglected.

Photograph by Richard Webb / Wikimedia (public domain).

The noise of the street faded as my mind wandered into memory and the cherished love that comes from loss. I imagined stepping through the door, hearing the ring of the doorbell, the unforgettable smell of beeswax and dust. My grandmother worked here. It was here that she met her first husband. I remembered her leading me as a child beyond the counter, through the warren of passageways and small offices, workshops and storerooms, with their pigeonhole boxes and cupboards. There was a brown-paper note stapled to one drawer; on it was written a list of dates noting when a new roll of packing paper had begun. The dates ranged from 1954 to 1972, many of them bore my grandmother’s handwriting. The note is still there in the empty shop.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a tractor crawling over the brow of the hill, bringing me back to myself. I noticed my reflection in the windowpane, and a sign hanging within. On it was written: “Imagine if we were proud of the legacy we were to leave for our grandchildren and knew we had played our part in creating it.” It struck me that I am the grandchild of someone who left such a legacy. I am the displaced custodian of that light. What am I going to do with that gift?

Psalm 78 begins:

Open your ears to what I am saying,
for I will speak to you in a parable.
I will teach you hidden lessons from our past—
stories we have heard and known,
stories our ancestors handed down to us.
We will not hide these truths from our children;
we will tell the next generation.

Is a legacy only a legacy when the story is remembered and retold? Or does it need to be enacted in some way? Wendell Berry seems to think so. Reflecting on local culture, Berry writes that unless there is a “pattern of reminding,” it is fairly useless to collect local stories and store them in books. If a local culture is to survive, it must be lived. Similarly, without participation a legacy becomes merely a fact of history and loses a certain quality as a story to be lived and passed on. A true legacy is a story for the making.

But how can I honor my family legacy when the doors are shut, and the boxes closed?

Jonas Salk encouraged us to become “good ancestors,” but to do that well, and faithfully, we need to learn from those who have gone before us, from their successes and their mistakes.

My knowledge of my family goes back roughly five generations. As well as working in Rickards, my grandmother, Mary, used to preach in the churches of the town and surrounding villages, often taking services in nursing homes until she was ninety years old. She began most days spending two hours in prayer, working through lists of people and places. She got her preaching gift from her father, Gandy, who was a market gardener on the Sheet Road and a street preacher for the Salvation Army. She was a poet, too, a gift she received from her grandmother.

Gandy ran his market garden on the southeastern slope of the Sheet, a place where my grandmother was born and lived all her life. Two of her siblings lived on that road their whole lives too. The land drops down toward a bend in the river Teme, then rises toward Foldgate Lane and the fields of Foldgate Farm, the old family farm.

I remember the stories my grandmother would tell of her childhood, dream-like memories of walking those fields with Merrymaid, the family horse, checking the gates and closing up the chickens in the barn for the night. It was a good life, a hardworking life, a life of faithful prayer and humble trust in the providence of God. The long years that have passed seem of little consequence, for the memory and bond to that life has been passed on to me and remains present.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the economy in the United Kingdom shifted toward larger towns, and agriculture declined significantly. Family farms like Foldgate faced increased pressures, and it was eventually sold. In fact, Gandy had to buy it off his father. Many of the surrounding fields were sold to cover losses. (Today much of the landscape is terraced with modern housing arranged in cul-de-sacs.) And so, in my grandmother’s generation, a life of prayer, simplicity, creativity, and neighborliness grew to be not only normal but needful for survival.

Today, I find myself dislocated from this home of my inherited legacy. I have never lived there. I live two counties away. But I see in something beautiful in the hope and the heartache of my ancestors’ lives. It shines with the light of grace and of homemaking. It’s this legacy that I feel somehow bound to, and responsible for.

This deep longing could easily be disregarded as some kind of whimsical nostalgia, but whimsy is often defined as something fanciful, and nostalgia is often understood as sentimental attachment to a time now lost to us. How have we moved so far away from these better expressions of place and community and homemaking that they now appear fanciful? Why are they so far beyond our reach, not seen as a credible, practical, possible way of life together?

The origins of the word nostalgia are found in the concept of homesickness, noted in medical journals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even accounting for the cause of death among soldiers in the American Civil War. But the malady of the last century is probably better described by the recently coined term, “solastalgia,” the result of a rapidly changing home environment, where the sense of home is lost in place.

A yearning for home is indeed often at the core of attempts to keep a legacy alive. Perhaps it is the legacy that makes the search for home so captivating. But the diagnosis of my present condition would be neither nostalgia nor solastalgia. I believe it is better summed up by the German word, Fernweh.

Fernweh is unhelpfully translated “wanderlust” in English. It is similar to the magnetic calling of a mountain felt deep within one’s “know-where,” the hunger part of the soul, but Fernweh is more than a compulsion to explore. One German friend described it as “being homesick for somewhere you’ve never been to yet.”

If that is what Fernweh means, then I have been stricken for some time. I have been stricken during every visit to my grandmother. I am stricken even now when I visit her grave. I am stricken, standing, staring through my reflection into an abandoned shop lined with empty boxes.

Fernweh has a peculiar Christian quality. It speaks eschatologically of the hope of our eternal, heavenly home. But Christian hope is founded on the promise that this heavenly home can be known in the here and now, “on earth as in heaven.” Not only do we pray for this, it is a promise given by Christ himself. In John 14 Jesus says, “The Father and I … will come and make our home with you.”

We may rightly understand this in terms of proximity, the promise of God’s presence in the everyday reality of faith. But what if we broaden our understanding of that little word “with”? What if it means together – God making his home together with us, working with us to create and nurture the kingdom of heaven in our midst? And if Jesus is essentially saying, “We’ll make this home together,” what, then, does homemaking with God look like?

These questions make my heart beat faster. It’s exciting – and terrifying. It means I have a part to play. I often don’t know what to do, and it’s easy to feel ill-equipped for the task. And yet I can give to the next generation some good examples in the lives of those now in glory. So, we start small. And at present, I see only glimpses. I see glimpses when we learn and share with one another, and our children, the stories and songs and prayers of people gone before us. I see glimpses in the way home education keeps us all humble learners, and when we discover traditional skills like basket weaving, or when my girls learn to crochet with wool owned by their great grandmother. I see glimpses when we share foraged fruit with neighbors. I see glimpses when the community plants an orchard for the benefit of the next generation.

What I long to pass on is what I have received – a way of life rooted in prayer, simplicity, and creativity – not because these values are quaint or sentimental but because my grandmother proved that these are virtues that embody faithfulness to God and neighbor.

The legacy of my ancestors is compelling because it shows something of homemaking with God in practice. Their lives, lived faithfully in their place, were based on the hope of “God with us,” a reality that impacts every aspect of life, the warp through which the tapestry of home is woven. And that, surely, is possible in every place, in every generation.

This is the gift of a legacy: a story for the making. It is a gift offered to us not only by our ancestors but by God himself. It is a gift I long to work for, and one I long to pass on to my children.