Memoirs

I was visiting family in Ohio shortly before my mother died in 2018. I was packing to return home to Sweden. One of my brothers, preparing to move, presented me with many boxes of old dusty letters and musty documents. "Either you take these back with you to Sweden or they get burnt up." I had only one suitcase and it was already full of canned pumpkin and pecans.

After an hour or so of exploring the contents of the boxes, I knew this was a treasure trove that certainly should not end up in the furnace. I decided to pay for two large extra suitcases to get the majority of the material back to Sweden. What I had discovered was over 100 years of correspondence from 1900, mostly between four generations of Quaker women. Mothers and daughters, sisters and cousins and girlfriends wrote regularly to each other -- and my grandmother saved everything! They wrote about their daily farm life, their experience at boarding school, their Quaker meetings, romances, births, illnesses and deaths. I have sorted between 4000 and 5000 handwritten letters, chronologically and by sender and receiver. Most of them are still waiting to be read. 

In addition, there are various journals of my ancestors as early as the American Civil War. My great-great-grandfather writes about escaping from the army because his conscience would not let him carry a gun. He made his way on foot to the North, where he was helped by Quakers and became one himself. 

These are  family treasures for me personally, but they are also of historical value and will in due time be sent to a historical Quaker archive in Indiana.

I am waiting for clarity about what kind of book might emerge from this material. At least I am eager for the silent voices to be heard.

In 1963 my father was working toward a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago. His professor, Sol Tax, had made a study of the Mayan village Panajachel in the 1930s. Now my father was to revisit the village and make a study with a 30-year perspective. I was 9 years old in late 1963 when we made the two-week journey from Chicago by truck and trailer to Guatemala. My younger brothers were 7 and 3 years old. Our parents were just 30. For 18 months we lived with the Mayan people in Panajachel. Mother homeschool my brother and myself. We were kept relatively healthy except for a scare with rabies, some tapeworm and food poisoning. We were helpful to Dad's research by being naturally and fully included in the lives of our playmates and their families. It was an immensely formative period for me. We drove back to Chicago in the spring of 1965, and our first Amazon parrot, Arturo, accompanied us. He remained my close friend until he suddenly died a couple of years later.

Now, 60 years later, I have material that begs to be woven into a book. In addition to my memories, I have the diary Mother had me write as part of my schoolwork. Mother kept a handwritten journal, and Dad kept a daily record of his research and all other aspects of our lives. I have letters that my parents wrote to their own parents during our time in Panajachel. In addition, I have both Sol Tax's and my father's doctoral dissertations. Finally, before he died, my father gave me a couple of hundred typewritten pages of Mayan people's stories, translated from Cachiquel (which at that time had not yet become a written language) to Spanish and transcribed by Sol Tax's informants in the 1930s. This material was used by Sol Tax and my father in their research. How might all these voices complement my own childhood memories?