It came to me today while I was again working on transcribing more of my mother’s letters that after my 1980 treatment program for alcoholism, the one that identified that I was a victim and depressed (first time news to me in my world), when I called and tried to talk to her about how she treated me in my childhood — before she became so defensive and I hung up on her and whopped and jumped for joy at my own audacity — I also had asked her if I could help her write her homesteading book.

She said to me, “That’s my book.  Bill and I were the homesteaders, not you.  I don’t want your help.  If you want to write a book, write you own.”

She never wrote hers.  I can’t write it for her, either, but I can put in the hours and hours and hours it takes to transcribe these letters.  I am emailing parts of them to my siblings, and through my one sister to her granddaughters — not about the abuse, but just about some of our childhood experiences that are interesting, that are a part of our family history and herstory.

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I still struggle with my own position in my mother’s reality, knowing it was running consistently behind the scenes and between the lines within many of her letters.  I know that in the 1959 early days of first arriving on the mountain homestead life was a special kind of good, a magical kind of good.  Hope abounded as did the thrill of this new adventure.  Life there had not had enough time to sour yet.

I also know that my mother experienced a lot of happiness if not actual bliss during those early months.  I know that some of her happiness meant I was spared trauma during that time.  I have clear memories of trying to please her.  I remember rolling up all of our sleeping bags every morning and being thanked.  I remember being a part of the family in the newness of this new life.

And yet I know the shadow of trauma was not far from me even then.  I am just blessed to not know about it specifically during those early homesteading times.  I am grateful for that.  Yet I also feel today like a page torn out of a story book, that sometimes can get stuck into the story and the rest of the time is removed and just plain missing.

My page was stuck in the story at the time of our early homesteading beginnings. I got to be one of the birthday candles on the cake of our new life.  Everyone was thrilled and excited.  No other party could have been that grand.

If I was placed in my outcast scapegoat role during these times, I do not remember it, nor do I want to.  I want this happy, included time.   It remains most precious to me, no matter what happened after the party was over and the sorrows began again.

I remember my father clearing the land.  I remember crawling through tunnels and into caves the tree trunks and roots made as my father scraped the land and piled them in the sweet, damp, soft earth windrows.  I have never smelled anything else that good in my life — but I smelled it then.

I would not trade those memories for anything.  I would not even have given my suffering away willingly if that would have meant I could not be with that land.  But this is for my future stories.

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This is an example of how my mother talks about the homestead in her letters to her mother in 1959:

“We had one rainy day this week & I couldn’t let the children out all day – nothing seemed nice then – but oh, today – how I wish you were here to share it with me.

I’m writing this letter to you while sitting on the cot outside in the sun.  There’s a very slight wind & the leaves & trees are rustling & the sound of it & the creek & the river sounds [like] the waves of an ocean!

Oh Mom, I hardly dare to love this place so & love it I do.  I am in love with it – just as Bill was.  It’s Shangri-la & I must share it with you each & every summer – now Mom, if we get title this winter & we must & I’ll never rest until we do!!  THEN now, I am serious – plan your summers here!!  Or at least 1 entire month every summer – but there’s so much room here you could have a little place all your own!  Now you write & answer me!!  No fancy trailer idea – no, no, no – a small log house or a tiny 26-ft trailer like ours – because after all, you live outdoors all summer here!!

Every time I look around I wish to run & shout with glee – oh, such beauty – I’ll never want again for anything —  I’ll wait & wait & wait only this land, only this land!!!  I love it, I love it, I love it – our homestead & we’ll live here for ever & ever & ever!!

…. I sound love sick & I am!”

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I read in today’s letters as I transcribed them over and over again my mother begged her mother to come up and visit.  Over and over again, and YES it got BORING transcribing those parts.  Yet I did, and I’ll leave her words of pleading to her mother alone for now though they will probably be edited out of any later published collection.

Right now I am just plowing through these papers and recording what my eyes see.  I imagine I’m like an earthworm as it digests garbage and craps out something better than what went into it in the first place.  For there will be crap within these pages, even if I can only sense it between the lines.  But these letters are still a story of lives lived, if only from my mother’s very filtered point of view.

But we were there.  We were her children and we were there.  For good or for bad (as my mother might say in a letter), how many people actually have this kind of a record of their childhood on paper?  And how strange it seems to me to be the one doing this work, the invisible one, the one mostly torn out of the book of the ongoing fabric of my family’s life except during these early homesteading months.

The one that was frozen on her childhood bed for days and days and days, standing frozen in corners for what seemed like eternity.  The one beaten and shamed and blamed and hated is the one with the ‘pen’ now.  And I still have stories of my own to tell.  But for now, I will let the time line of my childhood unfold itself as I sort out and order these letters while time remains — both for them and for me.  (Neither of us are getting any younger.)

What remains of the stories of our childhoods?  Who holds those stories, both the visible and the invisible?  Capture them.  Write them.  Tell them.  Share them.

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In the end, is there anything left BUT the mystery of it all?