Each of us began millennia ago. 

There is a term, "self-made." We might say, "He is a self-made man." There's no such thing. We are the products of our DNA, what we learn from our immediate family and relations, and how we are shaped by our communities. When I use the word "community," I don't mean a geographic location. We each belong to many communities: our neighborhood, our school, clubs and hobby groups, faith-based groups, our work environment. 

Who I am today began long ago.

    I cannot speak for others, but for me, I feel a deep connection to the past and have a profound respect for the ancestors. They weren't perfect, and I'm not perfect either, but they are real, and they live on through me. I tap the positive influences they provide and walk away from their errors with the hope that I have learned from their mistakes. And I forgive them. Forgiveness doesn't mean what someone has done is okay; it means moving past what they did. 

Many people created me.

        Let me begin with The Grandmothers.  Let me begin in Scotland in the late Iron Age.

      By having wheels on her cart, she could haul grasses for livestock feed and for thatching her roof, stones for walls, harvested flax to make her clothes, butchered carcasses for cooking, and young children too heavy to carry but to young to walk long distances. 

Wheels carried her in her chariot into battles.  Wheels on my first car, a 1968 Volkswagen "Beetle" carried me to my student teaching position in 1974. 

    Circles were important to her. Not only were her wheels circles, her house was a circle with a conical, thatched roof, her hearth was a circle in the middle of her house, and her house was one in a cluster within a round hill fort. 

Every one of the electric lights in my home is a circle. Instead of a fort to protect me, lights keep me safe. 

Circles had spiritual meaning for her, and today they have spiritual meaning for me as well. 

Why was I drawn to learn to spin and weave wool and flax? I cannot answer that question rationally. Were my ancestors telling me to take that path? I can spin with a drop spindle which was the method used until the Renaissance when spinning wheels were invented, and I can spin using a spinning wheel. I have bags of sheep fleeces in my closet. I attended sheep shearing school, but I've yet to have my own flock. Someday...

I can weave on a variety of looms. I'm comfortable with fiber arts. The practices of spinning and weaving are meditative, mindful. When I've got my foot pumping the pedal on my spinning wheel, all that matters is the fiber slipping through my fingers into the orifice on the fly wheel and the thread accruing on the spindle. When I use the primitive drop spindle, I find a rhythm that only ceases when I have to unwind the thread that has loaded the bottom of the spindle. When I weave, I am conscious of which threads need to rise for each pass of the shuttle and keeping my edges even. 

This is a modern loom from the Schacht company. The loom I currently own is about this size, but it only has four treadles and it is over a hundred years old. I used to have a much larger loom, but dressing a loom is back-breaking work. The weaver is hunched over the loom pulling each thread through the "heddle" that will carry that individual thread through the work. If I have 10 threads per inch and my fabric is to be 30" wide, that's more than 300 threads because I have a greater density of threads per inch along the edges.

 In an age of off-the-rack clothing, thrift stores and fabric resources, why would I learn to spin and weave? My sisters weren't interested in these skills. What is it in me that pulled me to ancient crafts? 

What is it in me that caused me to become a potter as well? COVID has interrupted my ceramic pursuits. I first learned at the Lexington Senior Center, have taken classes with the LFUCG Department of Recreation and at Kentucky Mud Works, and in the Studio Arts Department at the University of Kentucky. I came late to the craft, 64 years old. I wanted to try it for a great many years, but couldn't afford it. Throwing pots is highly addictive.  

Language is important to me -- beyond what we each need to communicate daily. There are writers and poets among my relations. My great grandfather, Joshua Fobes (no "r" in that name) Packard was a published author. My grandfather and my father were readers of poetry and prose. Here I am, pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry. 

My Celtic ancestors spoke dialects of the Gaelic tongue, a language which spread from the steppes to the Atlantic Ocean, from the northern tip of Scotland to the Iberian peninsula. Gaelic spoken in Scotland and in Ireland is closely related, but even with each of those places, there are dialects and accents.

I use words my Celtic ancestors used:

        Bard

        Bog

       Cairn

       Clan

        Crag

        Plaid

        Slogan

        Trousers

        Whisky

Many Grandmothers created me, and I give credit to the grandfathers as well. 

Some of my Grandmothers were Separatists, people later dubbed Pilgrims. One of my Grandmothers was Dutch, and she married a Separatist when the Separatists sheltered in the Netherlands. I am also the granddaughter of Puritans. Separatists believed faith should be separate from state control. Puritans thought they could "purify" the Church of England from within. Too many people don't understand that there were both Separatists and Puritans on that old puddle-jumper, the Mayflower. 

A few years after the Mayflower landed in North America, Samuel and Elizabeth Packard left home -- The Red House in Stohham Aspal, Suffolk, England, set sail on the Diligence, and joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This was Samuel's home in Suffolk. I ponder why someone would leave a stable existence, as stable as life may have been in the 1620s, living in a fine house to risk a sea journey and life in The New World. I doubt I'd be so brave. I'm a bit of a coward and definitely a home body. The seclusion of COVID hasn't bothered me. No, I don't think I would've walked away from this house to sail to The New World. 

Gore Vidal is credited with saying history is a record of the migrations of people. He also said: 

"When the white race broke out of Europe years ago, it did many astounding things all over the globe. Inspired by a raging sky-god, the whites were able to pretend that their conquests were in order to bring the One God to everyone, particularly those with older and subtler religions." 

Yes, that was a pretense, and it was a handy disguise for greed. Weren't the first European incursions in the western hemisphere in search of gold and silver? Then the more general economic interests of colonialism took over. History includes a record of the pursuit of wealth, but my Massachusetts ancestors didn't come to North America to convert the "heathens" or to find wealth. They were escaping the state church requirements in the British Isles. 

I can't repair what my ancestors did. I'm not responsible for what they did. I am responsible for my own behavior, my own moral compass. I am responsible for not repeating the errors of the past. 

Some of my grandparents lived on the continent of Europe -- in France, southern Germany and Switzerland. My French ancestor in America arrived in the early 19th century. He was a cabin boy from Toulouse --

on a merchant ship that wrecked on Maine's rocky coast. 

An American family in Maine took Jean Redonnette in, and they were his family for the rest of his life. However, Jean felt called to the sea. He became the captain of a clipper ship engaged in the China trade. His son, Clarence, followed the same path and took my great grandmother on a honeymoon to China by way of "The Horn" at the southern most tip of South America. I have the compass from his ship. 

[I'm trying to add a nifty little audio here to go with the ship, but my Adobe Captivate license hasn't been processed yet. The entire audio is over 3 min., and I just want to include  10 seconds. I can't do that until I have the software.]

Like my father and his siblings and my sisters, I was born in Needham, Massachusetts. My family has been in eastern Massachusetts for eleven generations. Being from New England, I have many seafaring ancestors and a cousin who is a lobsterman. My father's love of the sea granted him a career as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. This meant I was always near vast bodies of water while growing up. Like my father,  I too am drawn to the sea, and while I love Kentucky, I miss the sea keenly. I miss vacant beaches in winter where I could walk upon salt-rimed sand, listen to the huge rollers crashing against the shore, inhale the coastal fragrances, and hear the calls of gulls and shore birds. Why am I drawn to the sea?

My German-speaking Swiss ancestors arrived in the late 19th century and were "processed" through Ellis Island. 

I never knew my great grandparents who came from Switzerland, but I knew their daughters including Aunt Tilly, the eldest, who came through Ellis Island in her mother's arms. These sisters spoke High German, and I can remember as a child, if I walked in on a conversation not meant for my ears, they would shift into German. In high school and college, I studied German. Don't ask me to speak or write it now, but if I hear it or see it in print, I can usually tell what's being said. 

My mother was a splendid seamstress, and I too love to sew. She made this wedding gown for me. 

My own sewing took me in a very different direction. I had a business sewing accurate historic costuming for what would've been worn in England and the American colonies and in the early years of our nation. I created clothing for serious reenactors for the time period 1740 through 1820. I made clothing for males and females of all ages. My own children grew up learning to live in the past, right down to their shoes. They learned primitive camping/survival skills of our fore-bearers. 

Here I am --

in 2021, 68 years old with well earned wrinkles and flat feet, with arthritis and other annoying age-related issues, but I'm still here. My love of learning persists. My deep appreciation for the past sustains me. A "yellow dog" Democrat, a striver for free thinking, a bit of a coward, a tad of an artist, and a poet, I am still here.