What Else is in the Works

JUST ABOVE BONE: A Story-filled book about the power of family stories

  by Jerrie Hurd

The Concept:

I write because I believe in the power of story. I believe that we become the story we tell ourselves—literally. That’s true of people and nations and whole cultures. So, no surprise, my current project is about story itself.

The idea behind Just Above Bone is best illustrated by a twist my grandmother added to Cinderella. “We like that prince,” she said every time she finished the story. “A fine, handsome prince is a good thing and sometimes hard to find, but YOU need to pay attention to the fairy godmother—she got things done.”

Clever, but what about the little girl—me—who grew up hearing that version of Cinderella? Did that story, told that way, change my life? Of course, it did.

Stories are that powerful. That’s true of myth, mystery, and legend. It is also true of the stories our families tell us. Even their fairytales, can define who we are—if we let them.

But how often do we stop to examine those same-old, same-old, heard-them-a-hundred times stories that our families pass on? I’ve written published novels (Pocket Books) and short stories that have appeared in multiple literary magazines. And, even though, I love story, I never thought to give family stories a second thought. It’s all the same fabric. But while my fiction might move readers to tears or laughter—if I’m good at what I’m doing. Family stories live in our heads, constantly telling us how we should live our lives, cheering our successes, taunting our failures, defining our possibilities. Something that powerful needed a second look.

Just Above Bone chronicles my story-filled journey into my family’s storied past, including how we tell our fairytales. I sat down and listened—really listened—to those same-old, same-old, heard them a hundred times stories and asked new questions: Why do we tell that story? What do we tell that story that way? The results were surprising.

This book goes beyond one family’s storytelling tradition. It is about how taking a deep look at our stories, in general, can help all of us find firm footing amid the chaos of change. It is a love-poem to storytellers, a roadmap to roots, an exercise in finding home. It is about taking control of one’s life and one’s story and how to recognize real wisdom in a modern mobile world.

Sounds too simple to be true, but when you change your story; you change everything.

Sample Pages: 

Introduction

My family owned a sheep ranch located in the foothills just above the little town of Bone, Idaho. As a family, we used to describe ourselves as living “just above Bone.” We meant that literally. We were a hardworking people, not much given to fancy figures of speech. All in all, it was a good place to grow up, but I never planned to stay there. By the time I was nineteen, I was studying in Salzburg, Austria and trying to pretend that I knew more than how to stack hay and drive a farm truck with multiple gears. I’d never seen an opera or been to an art museum. The fact that I’d spent long hours of my childhood reading every book I could find wasn’t helping me sort the details of a more sophisticated lifestyle. However, I never, not once, entertained the idea of giving up and going home. Besides the books, I’d absorbed the stories my family told. I knew I came from a long line of strong women who’d succeeded in difficult circumstances. Salzburg was no biggie by comparison. All I had to do was trust myself to figure it out. And I did.

Question is: when did I stop trusting that storied legacy?

It’s currently trendy to send your saliva off to a lab. Back comes an analysis of who you are according to your DNA. I tried that. I’m completely vanilla. My Scandinavian ancestry barely dips into Europe—the northern edge of Germany and Lithuania. I was disappointed. A part of me was hoping for an exotic revelation. On second thought, I knew that who I am was more about story than DNA.

I’m talking about the stories that my family handed down to me—the ones I thought I’d outgrown or didn’t need any more. It’s easy to discount those same-old, same-old, heard-them-a-hundred-times tales, but, maybe, we shouldn’t. Maybe, that’s not wise. “In our family, we . . .” is a sentence many of us can complete with ease. We may not agree with the underlying sentiment, but it’s there—always right on the tip of our tongue. Recognizing that, why wouldn’t we assume that our ingrained sense of family is closely tied to our own sense of self—who we think we are?

Here’s the thing: I can be proactive about a predisposition to certain diseases revealed in a DNA test. Likewise, I can re-shape my family’s stories to fit my current circumstances, allowing me to be the person I want to be, not the person my family and their stories say I am. I can do that no matter what happened in my family’s past, but only if I pause and pay attention to the grip those stories have on me. That simple truth slapped me in the face one day.

I was critiquing manuscripts at the end of a three-day writers’ conference. Mid-afternoon, I sat down with a thirty-something writer who was working on a novel about three generations of women—mothers and daughters—who seemed to do nothing but increase each other’s misery. It was a well-written, if melancholy, book that readers, I suspected, would find a downer, so I asked the author, “Why do you want to write this story?”

That’s a deceptively simple question that I usually have to ask several times before getting to the core. This writer is the exception. Without hesitation, she answers, “I wanted to understand why all the women in my family marry men we don’t love. I mean, God forbid one of us should actually break the cycle.”

I was startled, not because she was so clear-eyed about her central narrative, not because of her bitterness, and not because I didn’t believe her. Families run these kinds of patterns all the time. I was startled because I hadn’t realized the book was autobiographical. And—more to the point—I’d recognized similarities between the generations of her family and my own. Actually, I thought the similarities were nearly universal. Except for the particulars, she could have been writing about almost any set of mothers and daughters, mine included, with one huge exception. In my family, in addition to stories of overcoming difficult circumstances, we tell great love stories.

The author shook her head and continued. She felt trapped. Her family had a pattern of failed relationships. So why had she expected her marriage to be different? “It’s like they gave me a script. I can follow the family script or struggle against it. Either way, the script owns me.”

“The script owns you?”

She shot me an incredulous glance. “Isn’t it obvious? Following the family script means an incredibly strong mother-daughter bond because the women in my family are forever commiserating with one another about our failed loves. We never let anyone else in. On the other hand, if I took a chance on real love, I’d lose the support of my family, who got me through one bad marriage already. Given my family’s background, how likely is it that I can recognize real love anyway?” She shrugged. “How do you make some kind of Disneyfied happy ending out of that?”

I wasn’t used to being challenged quite so directly. Worse, I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable. The more she talks, the more I wonder about my family and our love stories. Is that also a family script? If so, how have those stories—that family pattern—affected my life? At the same time, I’m mentally resisting the idea. Nobody takes family stories seriously. I don’t. Or hadn’t for a long time. What’s more, I don’t want to investigate this. I have other plans, other projects. And yet, another part of me is screaming, “Pay attention!”

The importance of family stories is best explained in Aesop terms. Take the famous Aesop fable of the ants and the grasshopper. The ants work all summer putting food away while the grasshopper fiddles. When winter comes, the hungry grasshopper knocks on the ants’ door looking for dinner. The usual moral is something like “Don’t fiddle the summer away.” Ok, fine, but who keeps the ants from dying of boredom—all winter long—if not that fiddling grasshopper?

         Here’s the thing: If my family gave me an ant’s point of view, likely I will have to make a big shift to appreciate silly, seemingly slothful grasshoppers. On the other hand, if I come from a grasshopper family, likely I’ve learned to look down on steadier, plodding lifestyles that are just not cool. Now, think what happens when a grasshopper marries an ant, or an ant hires a grasshopper. Story is serious stuff—like it or not.

Before our scheduled hour was up, I tried to explain to the author that my family tells love stories—something very different from the pattern in her novel. I wanted to her to understand that, at some level, families and individuals choose how to tell their stories, and that she could change her novel and her life if she wanted to—but she shook her head. Her novel was autobiographical; therefore, she felt constrained by real events. She didn’t think she could lie about who she is or about her family’s history.

Maybe it goes without saying that we cannot separate who we are from where we came from. I can act all grown-up and tell myself that I’m my own person, but, like a reflex, when I cook, I cook the way my mother cooked. When I open my mouth to talk politics, I sound like my father. When I’m shopping for clothes, pink is not a possibility: my grandmother hated pink. Those are the little things. The big thing is my family’s love stories. I’d always considered myself luckier than most because my family tells great love stories, but I realize now that there is a hazard. If I listen long enough, I could spend a lifetime expecting to be swept off my feet. What happens when our lives don’t turn out like the stories we’ve heard?

Several years ago, I took a class from the novelist Ursula K. LeGuin, who was a great believer in the power of story, but not the kind of story that dominates blockbuster movies and bestselling books. She preferred “carrier-bag stories,” her phrase. Even in pre-history, bringing down a mastodon was likely an event that demanded the telling of a story. But killing a mastodon didn’t happen every day. Gathering seeds and roots and berries and snaring small game in nets was the regular routine. For that you don’t need a spear, you need a carrier-bag, a place to put the things you’ve gathered including the medicine bundle, the talismans and the stories that transfer culture—the stories that literally tell the group how to get through hard times—this winter and next winter and the one after that. Even in the Twenty-First Century, most families tell stories that center on how they survived, started over, or managed to overcome great odds. The message is simple: our ancestors survived. We can, too, because we’re part of a long tradition of brave, resourceful people.

If you go beyond that central theme, there are other stories, told less often, but not less powerful. I began to wonder, what was in my family’s carrier-bag? Turns out, that’s not a question with a simple answer. I poked around, not really knowing what to expect. At minimum, I hoped to stop running patterns I don’t understand, like never wearing pink. Mostly, however, I wanted to understand those love stories. I’m pretty sure my family’s track record in the relationship department is no better than most. So, what do we gain by telling ourselves great love stories?

 I had no idea where this project would take me. I traveled from that ranch in Idaho to an island off the coast of Denmark with various stops along the way. I talked to aunts, uncles, cousins and friends of the family, anyone who would listen and try to answer my questions. My understanding of story and the power of story grew and changed as I grew and changed. I came to rely on two questions: Why do we tell that story? Why do we tell that story that way? Those might seem like simple questions, but they aren’t.

This book is the result of that journey and those questions. I’m sharing my carrier-bag, my collection of the strange, wonderful, inspiring, heartrending discoveries that I made with the hope that others will be inspired to gather and examine their own stories. Let me be clear, I was not doing genealogy. Yes, I gathered some documents as I went along, but I wasn’t focused on names and dates—the things that need to be written down to be remembered. Likewise, I was not writing a memoir in the traditional sense. I was gathering stories—the stories that I can’t forget, even when I might want to—the stories that my family uses to explain who we are in a sense that is much larger, much more significant, than simply where we were born or how we died. And, yes, I know that sometimes those stories are exaggerated and not always true. However, I was surprised to discover that most were connected to real events. In some cases, the stories include details that the teller couldn’t have known were historically significant. The teller was simply repeating things he or she had heard from a previous generation or generations, but when I took the time to check, I was impressed at how deep the collective memory goes. That said, I don’t think stories have to be historically correct to be powerful. They just need to be repeated and believed, which is why I kept coming back to my two questions: Why that story? Why that story told that way? In other words, why does my family tell a particular story with a particular slant or purpose? What, exactly, are we saying about who we think we are? Trust me, those questions will reveal layers and layers of surprises including the root reason a group of individuals continues to identify as a family. It’s the stories that most often establish a family’s core values.

I have come to believe that knowing my family’s storied history may be as important as knowing my family’s medical history. And I’m not alone in that belief. It has been documented that people who experience a genealogical void often have serious identity problems. Hence the drive for adopted children to find their “real” parents and for African Americans, who have a slavery background, to make a genetic connection to a particular part of the African continent.

         I’m lucky. No genealogical void. I have a rich and colorful background—plenty of stories, more than enough surprises, and lots of dirt. Doesn’t every family have at least one pirate and/or Mormon polygamist in their past? The trick is deciding the takeaway. Dirt is where things get muddy. It’s also where things grow. I uncovered stories I’d never heard before and stories I’d heard too many times in too many conflicting versions. In every case, I never assumed the first version was the right one. I always expected that if I turned the dirt one more time, I’d find a different perspective, something wiser or wittier. In that, the old stories never failed me even when some family members did.

         “What do you want?

         “Why?”

         “Who asked you to look into this?”

I asked me. And I’m glad I did. It sounds too simple to be true, but when you change the way you tell your story, you change everything.

A Train-Stopping Love Story

My family tells one story more often than any other—the story of my great-grandmother Sophia and the railroad she took hostage. Around our kitchen table, Sophia’s story is told heroic-style, meaning we don’t just tell the story, we brag. My great-grandmother didn’t stop one or two trains. She brought an entire railroad to a standstill. No surprise, there are several versions of the story, and every reason to believe it’s exaggerated. Stories get better over time. That said, this one seems to be based on a real incident. And, more important, it’s a good story.

In 1879, when Sophia was fourteen years old, she ran away from home, because of her abusive stepfather, and got a job working for the railroad. She weighed less than a hundred pounds, a detail my family adds because, in this case, size matters. Working for the railroad was no easy town job. She began as a cook’s helper and later became a cook—part of a crew of women who fed the men who were laying railroad tracks across some of the last outposts of the American frontier. The job consisted of fixing dinner at night and breakfast the next morning in one place. Then, while the men were laying track, the women loaded their tent kitchen onto mules and moved four or five miles down the roadbed—the distance the men were expected to advance that day. Then the women unloaded their mules, set up camp, and had dinner ready by the time the men caught up with them. This was hard, backbreaking work, done six and a half days a week.

And it was dangerous.

The cooks were out ahead of the men at a time when so-called “marauding Indians” were marauding mainly because they were hungry. Besides that, the job had its own hazards. Sophia knew a girl who got crippled when one of the mules fell on her, and another who was blinded when one of the stoves exploded. Those tragedies were felt keenly, because the women formed extraordinarily close bonds, constantly “watching out for each other”—a polite euphemism for the fact that one occupational risk was from the track-laying men who might not be a “gentleman” or who might ‘forget himself” while working in remote places. Add to that the usual hazards: sudden storms, bad water, medical emergencies, the list goes on and on . . ..

However, none matched the raw, unregulated competition between rival railroads that sometimes led to two companies laying track through the same narrow canyon. The company that finished first got paid; the other got nothing. In that race, both companies’ crews were typically guarded by armed men, who hardly needed an excuse to start shooting. What’s more, since everyone knew that crews worked best on full stomachs, kidnapping the competition’s cooks was considered fair game.

Those railroad-building details are interesting, but I’m not under the impression that this part of my family’s history is extraordinary. In times past, life was physically hard, and lots of people had to overcome all kinds of gritty difficulties. Does that matter? Research done at the University of Graz, in Austria, has identified an “ancestor effect”: individuals who think about their ancestors just prior to a job interview or college exam boost their chances of success. Dr. Peter Fischer hypothesizes that thinking about one’s origins . . . provides people with a positive psychological resource. In other words, when I remind myself of the difficulties my ancestors overcame, I approach my own challenges with a greater sense of identity and self-confidence: If my great-grandmother Sophia brought an entire railroad to a standstill, I can do this. I’m made of the same stuff.  Evidently, that attitude can make a measurable difference, which is probably why most families continue to tell stories that emphasize how hard it used to be and/or what amazing, resourceful people we come from.

In Sophia’s case, she not only overcame the day-to-day difficulties, but she also stood up for herself. She was still young—nineteen years old—when she fell in love. He was the crew foreman, and, when he proposed marriage, she accepted with one condition: before they set a wedding date, she had to collect her back pay.

The railroad company was having financial difficulties, so all its workers were owed considerable back pay. Sophia was owed more than a year’s worth—which became the young couple’s first disagreement. George, her fiancée, doubted that she would ever collect all that was due her. Most of the so-called “skilled men,” like him, would eventually settle for less than what they were owed. As a lowly cook, Sophia would be lucky to get anything. George wanted her to forget the money and come away with him. They would make do, together, on hard work.

Sophia had great respect for hard work—she’d certainly done her share—but she’d been poor all her life. She was not going to start her married life with just the clothes on her back. On that point, she was adamant. She would marry George when she got her back pay and not one day sooner.

Word of their impasse spread up and down the railroad lines. In the five years that Sophia had worked with various crews, a great many railroad workers had met and come to like her. More to the point, they knew she was strong-willed. Most were not betting on George being able to change her mind. The story of the young lovers and their standoff changed to sympathy. And sympathy changed to action. The men in the camp where Sophia was working quite early one day for her sake. Once started, the strike spread quickly. Next day, it had jumped to two other camps. Three days later, it involved several more camps. Men, who were laying track in three directions, simply put down their tools and refused to go on—not because they hoped to get their own pay, but because they wanted to see Sophia married in style.

The railroad bosses fired her. Without an easy alternative, they must have thought she’d give up, get married, and move on. If so, they were wrong. Sophia stood her ground, the men refused to return to work, and the strike continued to spread. In fact, the strike went on much longer than anyone might have imagined in a situation where no one got paid unless they laid track fast and finished first. However, it was the bosses who gave in. They paid Sophia and her husband-to-be what they were owed. It is said that, at the wedding, the band played all night, and the guests danced even longer “when they had to whistle their own tune to keep celebrating.”

Sophia and George’s back wages, combined with her savings, were enough to buy one hundred and sixty acres in southeastern Idaho. Those acres were the beginning of a sheep-and-cattle ranch that would include thousands of acres.

My grandma Melba ran the ranch after Sophia. After that, my mother was responsible for the largest remaining piece, a couple thousand acres, where she grazed cattle. Now, I live in a Colorado college town, hundreds of miles away, and yet that story hangs over my life, telling me, on a good day, that I can do anything, or chiding me, on a bad day, for not conquering the world. Until I started thinking seriously about family stories, I didn’t appreciate how often I thought about that story. I had assumed it existed mostly as deep background. I was a grown-up, making my own decisions, too busy—far too busy—to wonder why hundreds of miles didn’t insulate me from stories I’d heard maybe hundreds of times. I suspect most people shrug off the family stories, not only because they’re just stories, but because they’re the same old stories. We think we know them, until we stop and really pay attention.

And there’s more . . ..

We also tell the story of a girl rescued by a young man riding a white horse. I’m not kidding. The story is exactly that clichéd. That girl was Melba, my grandmother, the second woman to run the family ranch. She is affectionately known in the family as “Auntie Mame in Boots” because Auntie Mame was her favorite movie, and because she spent most of her life trying to be more madcap than the movie’s main character. It’s an oldie—1958—starring Rosalind Russell.

Melba met Sophia’s youngest son, Irvin, at a summer dance. She was sixteen, living with an older, married sister who had children of her own and resented the extra mouth to feed. Melba remembers hard work and never having anything nice (meaning clothes) to call her own. Irvin, on the other hand, was handsome, funny, and he rode a white horse. Literally.

By that time, Sophia and her family had prospered and were known as “The White Horse Nielsens” because even their wagon horses were light-colored grays, notably well bred. All that next fall and winter, Melba watched for Irvin and went out to greet him whenever he rode past her house on his way to pick up a wagonload of beet pulp, a by-product of processing sugar beets that is fed to livestock in winter. Unfortunately, it is a notoriously fragrant by-product. Melba teased him about courting her while “smelling worse than vinegar.” In turn, he accused her of liking his horse more than she liked him.

Irvin was not the only one to notice that Melba had an eye for a good horse as well as a good man. The neighbors began to gossip. We usually tell this story with an attitude of mockery, as if pitying the poor neighbors for not understanding that any woman in her right mind would always choose both—the fine gentleman and the fine horse.

Continuing our love-story tradition, my father supposedly proposed to my mother in the fourth grade. In the family photo album, there is a picture of the two of them and their fourth-grade class. Nothing out of the ordinary, it’s a school picture: three rows of schoolchildren lined up on the steps of their schoolhouse. Everyone is looking at the camera except my dad. He has taken a step back and is glancing sideways at my mother, who’s standing next to him. It’s such a fun, sweet picture; you want to believe the story of their fourth-grade love. However, I couldn’t help wondering which came first: the story or the photo? I asked my aunts, one by one, if my mother or my father had ever been interested in anyone else. They claim not. So, what can I say? Either the story is true, or the story has been repeated so many times it has replaced memory.  

My sister, Sharen, an engineer with several patents to her name, has never been impressed with the family love stories. When I mentioned my new interest in those old stories, she rolled her eyes. “You mean the family fairytales?”

I draw a deep breath. Are they mostly make-believe?

Maybe.

Probably.

All stories are a mix of lies and truth. That doesn’t change the power—the hold—they have on us.

A hundred and fifty years ago, there was a legendary “tie yourself down” stretch of railroad that ran along Beaver Canyon, one of the places where Sophia worked. The road was so rough that a crew was stationed there with the sole purpose of cleaning up the loads that were lost on the rocks below because they weren’t tied down. “Tie yourself down”—meaning prepare for a rough ride—is a phrase I whisper to give myself courage. I whispered that phrase to myself long before I learned that the term originated with my great grandmother’s railroad background. Most of us have no idea how deep the stories go. We never question our family’s way of describing the world. “Tie yourself down,” we say and go on like that’s the only way.

Here’s the sad part of my parents’ story. My father served in World War II. Besides having his feet frozen in the Battle of the Bulge, he was one of the first paratroopers to jump into Germany across the Rhine River. I’m told that the survivors of that jump talked about whether any of them would get out alive. In a sense, none did. It is the unanimous opinion of the family that my father “never got over the war.” To make a long story short, my mother married a young man who was different from the light-hearted boy she fell in love with in the fourth grade. Sophia’s love story didn’t end like a fairy tale, either. She was a widow longer than she was married. In both cases, however, these are not the stories we choose to tell most often.

And, ironically, my grandmother, the one who married the fine young man riding the white horse, was skeptical of fairy tales. Whenever she got to the end of Cinderella, she always paused and added, “We like the prince. A fine, handsome prince is a good thing and sometimes hard to find, but YOU need to pay attention to the fairy godmother. She’s the one who got things done.”

At the time, I thought she was being silly. I knew that was not how the story was usually told. Later, when I was a teenager, recalling her version of that story, I amused myself thinking she was talking about women, like herself, older and largely unappreciated. I liked the twist. I thought Good for her. We all need to get a dig in once in a while. Now, as I reconsider my family’s stories, I think she was wise—wiser than I knew. “Pay attention to the fairy godmother” means notice how the story is being told because, more often than not, that shapes how we see the world.

Here’s another example. My family has tales we call “Oh Dear Me’s.” As a child, I was allowed to tell an “Oh Dear Me” once, to rant against the unfairness of the world, but I was never encouraged to repeat one. In our family, repeating that kind of story was equated with wallowing in self-pity—something we supposedly didn’t do.

I know a family that handles hard times by referring to them as memories. “We’ve just made a memory,” they’ll say in the face of some new setback. According to their scheme of things, you have no way to lose. No matter what happens, you’re always rich in memories.

While spending several weeks in Ireland, I watched a mother and her young daughter stop frequently at the graveyard across the street from where I was staying. I asked and found out that they were visiting the grave of the child’s sister, her twin. The mother seemed to think it was important for the living child to share her memories, almost daily, with the stillborn sister. I couldn’t help wondering how deeply that ritual would affect the living child. Would she feel the burden of living for two? Or would she come to think that she was luckier than most because she had an unseen sister to share her life with? Either way, she would not escape the story of her birth. None of us do. And unless we make a conscious choice, our stories get stuck in our heads.

“We are the White Horse Nielsens.”

“We don’t tell “Oh Dear Me’s.”

“WE STOP TRAINS.”

My sister, Janet, a compliance officer at her local hospital, laughs. “My job is to keep things on track and running. You know that, right?”

Right.

And that’s exactly what’s tricky about these old stories. They can seem irrelevant to our day-to-day because they run deep. So deep, most days we don’t hear them whispering in the background. And yet, who among us doesn’t stand, fight, walk away—or tell love stories—based on some notion of who they are or what their family expects of them. I don’t know why my ancestors decided that, to hold our family together, we needed to tell love stories. But, when it’s my turn, I tell the Porsche story.

My husband-to-be courted me in a brand-new Porsche. I didn’t know much about cars at the time, still don’t. I grew up on that ranch in Idaho, where we drove the kind of vehicles that handle dirt roads and lots of dust. Old pickup trucks, mainly. I appreciated the new-car shininess and the new-car smell, but I had no idea that a Porsche was more than just another German-made car. In fact, I thought it was just a flattened version of a Volkswagen.

That is, until I went back to college that fall. The first weekend, when he came to see me, my roommates’ mouths dropped. “He drives a Porsche?” they asked in near unison. I nodded, embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know I was supposed to be impressed.

Now, whenever I tell the Porsche story, I always add that whatever impressed me about my husband-to-be, it wasn’t his car. Our love story, the one I tell at family gatherings, has a comic twist—me being too young and naïve to appreciate his fancy car. But over time, as stories do, the Porsche story has become a touchstone. Whenever the day-to-day gets to be too much, that story is there to remind us of who we are.

In private moments, “Honey, you don’t need a Porsche” is enough said.

Synopsis:

Just Above Bone: a story-filled book about the power of family stories

By Jerrie Hurd

Themes:

This book is about those same-old, same-old, heard-them-a-hundred-times family stories that can’t be shrugged off because they shape who we are.

This book acknowledges that stories don’t have to be true to have outsized influence. Families often exaggerate or sanitize their stories.

This book wants to be a 14 x 45-foot billboard shouting: Pay Attention.

This book can be read as a love poem or a cautionary tale.

Bottom line: if you change your story, you change everything.

Chapters:

Introduction

My family owned a sheep ranch in the hills above the little town of Bone, Idaho. We described ourselves as living “just above Bone.” Years later, and miles away, I discovered that I still lived “just above bone” because I took the family stories with me.

A Train-Stopping Love Story

I examine the story my family tells most often. It’s a good story, but why did it become our central story?

Touchstone Stories

I ask if other families have central stories. Most do.

Never Doubt A Climbing Snake

My aunt’s tale of a climbing snake. I finally get it. Nonsense stories are never about climbing snakes. They’re about something deeper.

Deep in Sheep

My grandmother is a problem. Her daughters are embarrassed by her wild antics. Her granddaughters love her because she gives them permission to break all the rules.

No Matter Where You Roam

My mother hates my version of our history. Are the stories wiser than both of us?

The Family Photo Album

Do we save the wrong things?

The One That Got Away

A friend’s mother was likely a spy during World War II, but the daughter can’t be sure because her mother remained tightlipped to the end. How great is that loss?

My Father’s War

Are some stories better not told?

Lost Luggage: The Immigrant Story

Immigrant families almost always begin their stories with how they came to America as if there was no time before.

My Religious Heritage

Sorry, I need my stories to be real. Sanitized versions don’t count.

The Barefoot Guide to Summer and Every Little Thing That Matters

My aunt works at the DAR Library in Washington D.C. and has stories to tell.

The Love Letters in My Garage

I am haunted by the idea that my sister couldn’t escape an abusive marriage because of our family stories.

Warning: “Happily Ever After” Is a Long, Long Time

My family tells female-centered stories. Does that make us unique?

Travel Alert: Pirates in Your Past

I return to the old country.

Secrets of a Skunk Chaser

A famous Pueblo storyteller asks, “Who are you?”  She means in a storytelling/mythic sense, not my usual bio.

The Three Musketeers

My son dies of Covid. I doubt he ever thought of himself as living “just above Bone,” so what, I wonder, is the point of gathering all this family stuff? The hard questions come last.