Over the river, and through the wood

I vow each year not to do holiday posts, but — so much for that. We have holidays for a reason, and every culture in the world has had them. But sometimes we need to take a look at our reasons for celebrating, and exactly what it is that matters. We need a way to mark the passage of the seasons, to remind ourselves with lessons from the past why we have reason to celebrate, to review our mistakes as well as our blessings.

When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about this song that I learned as a kid for Thanksgiving:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.
(read the rest of the lyrics at Wikipedia)

It might seem a silly thing to remember during serious times, and on yet another holiday that seems to offend so many people. But holidays can be a good way to remind us how we’ve changed and progressed, and to find new ways to change and keep moving forward. It might interest you to know that the song quoted above, titled “A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day,” was written by a woman who was well ahead of her time — or perhaps a better way to say that would be that she wasn’t as behind as the rest of her people of her time. According to Wikipedia, “Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – July 7, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist.” The entry goes on to state this:

She was a women’s rights activist, but did not believe significant progress for women could be made until after the abolition of slavery. Her 1833 book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans argued in favor of the immediate emancipation of the slaves, and she is sometimes said to have been the first white person to have written a book in support of this policy. (read entire Wikipedia article)

It’s good for any society to be able to review its errors and learn from them, to evolve as a people and keep working to make things better for every member that it carries into the future, so this seems a good song to use to celebrate this day of thanks.

As for memories of grandfather’s house, I don’t have any. My maternal grandfather died before I was born, and the other lived farther away than we could afford to travel. But I knew my maternal grandmother. We took trips to Oregon see her at other times of the year, until she came to live with us when I was a teenager, and we spent Thanksgiving with her at our house most of the years that followed. I also remember trips as a small child, mostly around Easter, to what had once been her father’s little homestead in Potrero, CA, a tiny town pocketed in the hills north of Tecate, Mexico, and made famous recently by wildfires and mercenaries.

My great-grandfather’s house was a favorite place for my mom to visit when she was a girl, and I can imagine her going there for Thanksgiving, though not through “white and drifting snow.” Even at Potrero’s altitude of about 2300 feet, snow rarely falls there. I remember the house where my great-grandfather lived only as a fireplace still standing long after a fire had destroyed it. There was a newer house by then that a great uncle lived in, but it seemed that every family member found a reason to walk past or through that burned-out structure on each visit to the property, imagining the past, until it was sold off sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s.

Even though there’s no snow in Potrero, or here, on Thanksgiving, there is this memory of place special to me and my family, a place I wouldn’t know how to get to today, and a man named Christian Nelson, whom I never met. He was originally from the island of Læsø, in Denmark, where his father was a fisherman. Chris herded geese as a boy, and left home at 14 to spend years at sea, on merchant ships, until he decided to settle here as a young man. His name should probably have been spelled Nielsen, but he spelled it Nelson when he came here in 1881 because he thought it seemed more American. He later joked that it turned out he’d made a Swede of himself.

I haven’t been much for genealogy, not having children of my own, and I don’t think about Chris Nelson very often. But a couple of days ago I sorted through some old books and came across two that mention him. One is a memoir my grandmother wrote about growing up in Potrero, and the other was written by a woman named Ella McCain, who happened to be with my great-grandmother, Josephine Gray, on the day she met her future husband. Ella described the Danish farmhand Chris Nelson as a “big, barefoot boy.” He worked for a local rancher they were visiting who’d just married into Ella’s family, and Ella mentions how she and her sisters teased Josephine about Chris, which leads me to think there must have been an attraction from the start. Ella also wrote that Chris Nelson had landed in San Diego Harbor on the four-masted sailing ship Trafalgar, and that information sent me searching the Web for more. It took a while to get the right search words, but I finally found a listing for the ship, which no doubt looked something like this.

I couldn’t be with the rest of my family this year, only my spouse and my dog who are both very special to me. Still, snow or no snow, in the past two days I’ve been over the hills and through the woods of my memories and family history, to my great-grandfather’s house, where he kept bees, won ribbons at fairs for his peaches, and provided eggs, butter, milk, and honey to my grandmother and her family during the Depression, when such luxuries were hard for them to come by in San Diego. He spoke four languages, that I know of, and he raised eight children, four each with two consecutive wives. (Josephine died 13 years into their marriage, when my grandmother was five.) He set a standard for the whole family, of love, hard work, honesty, generosity, and care for the land, lessons that have stayed with us for generations.

The riches we leave our families have little to do with money, or even genetics. I grew up with two adopted siblings, and we all learned the same love and values. Those were what we carried forward into our lives, a gift partially from Chris Nelson of Læsø, Denmark and Potrero, California, and partly from others before, after, and beside him, including my dad’s family back in Missouri. Both Chris Nelson and my dad have given their children and grandchildren a legacy of values that are worth a fortune, the same kinds of values I’ve done my best to adhere to through my life. Today I’m keeping those memories and ideals that count most in my mind, and I feel very grateful to have the memories and family that I do. But I also remember now, which I didn’t with as much awareness as a child, that there were people here before my grandparents, great-grandparents, or anyone else in my family came here. The Kumeyaay lived in Potrero well before my great-grandfather or any other white person ever heard of it or named it. The Kumeyaay considered the mountains near there sacred, and had their own names for them.

I understand why many people are offended by celebrations of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving that only recall a portion of the past, that glorify the western expansion of white people and the raping of a land that was just fine before we ever landed here. I think it’s important to remember that bitterness and the wrongs that have been done, as well as our growth as a combined people, the lessons learned that are worth salvaging. We learn from our mistakes, if we’re humble and respectful and we bother to look back and see clearly. We can’t change history, but we can remember it, the good and the bad, and do our best to make the future better.

In enjoying that song that I learned as a child, and in learning more about the woman who wrote it, I have to ask myself what voices of healing we may be ignoring today, just as her message of healing was ignored at the time she called for abolition. What voices, even before hers, tried to tell us not to begin slavery, or not to begin to rob Native Americans of their lands and way of life? When we gather around tables and talk about football games, or watch the news, what voices can we hear, behind the media’s hype, behind the conversation at the table? What voices are calling to us to do the right thing? How much weight and importance do we give them in our lives — everyday, not just on holidays?