A TALE OF FOUR CHIMNEYS

When was the house here?

We have just made an overnight trip to the mountain region of our state.  Hiking and exploring, we saw these chimneys within a few miles radius.  The one pictured to the left was a long way off 'the beaten path.'  The one below now stands alongside a secondary paved road, yet still somewhat remote from 'the hustle and bustle.'

When was the nearby road built?

    In the 1970's and for a few years thereafter, wood heat was the rage.  Wood stoves, fireplaces and fireplace inserts were . . .well, 'hot items'.  There has been a distinct 'cooling' of the market for these items.  The time was when such were basics.

    However, seeing these structures prompted my reflections in a direction other than home heating.

"This Old House Once Knew My Children . . ."

     As a therapist who places great stock in "Family Systems Therapy", I often engage my clients with an instrument known as a genogram. (Google: "What is a Genogram")  While also an academic historian, I have little interest in mere genealogy . . . or, as I call it,

'who was kin to whom was kin to whom'.  Family relationship patterns and dynamics and legacies are other matters.

    It is a lamentable fact that very few of us know a great deal about anyone on our 'family tree' back more than two or three, at the most, generations. (What is also lamentable is the 'dysfunction' and regressive behavior that characterize so many families.) Those of us with grand-children and even great-grand-children know how tenuous the ties of relationship can become, especially with geographic mobility. 

    Sometimes clients seem a bit startled when I mention the obvious (to me) fact that their parents had parents who had parents who . . .  Here is an exercise that might yield novel perspectives: Consider the oldest 'ancestor' whom you knew . . . grand-parent, great-grand-parent, whomever . . . as having once been, say, four years old, then being 25, then middle-age.  Such an endeavor has 'humanized' the 'dead past' for many. 

    Ostensibly, within the structures that were around the first three of the above pictures, families went about many of the routines of life that still endure.  With some imagining, I can believe that there was birthing, chickenpox and whooping cough and flu epidemics, shared meals, work, hard times, games, laughter, Christmas, death, children growing up and moving away all taking place there. 

    And there are situations where not even a chimney is left to mark the place where important matters occurred.  Several years ago while visiting an uncle in Alabama, he drove me by the address where he had grown up and where my grand-parents had lived for many years.  Nothing there but a vacant lot!  Regretably, I have cousins in that area whom I have never met. 

    What became of those people in all the vanished cabins?  For that matter, what will  become of us?  Nor do I believe such ruminating to be 'morbid'.  I remember Dr. Fred Craddock's commenting that anyone whose perspective was no larger than the years between one's own birth and death was an orphan in the universe.  

   One possible consequence of  such an exercise (of imaging one's forebearers as 'young' ) could be a reconsideration of priorities or what will endure.  We learned that part of the local lore and legend in the area where these chimneys are located was that one particularly ambitious entrepreneur would often accept parcels of land, even homesteads, as payment for debts in his store.  Whether he was 'grasping' and 'cruel', we did not hear.  We did see his former place of business, now boarded up and dilapidated.  "A generation comes and a generation goes . . ."

     Now, this kind of thinking can be said to lead to a cynicism . . .'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'.  We in the 'right now' are part of a link in the parade of humanity. As such, we are the benefactors of much that has preceded us.  In earlier posts, I have noted my belief that there is no such entity as the 'self-made person'.  Many people, events, circumstances, and 'chance' along with our own efforts have gone into helping make us who we are.  Unless we adopt what someone has termed a 'to hell with posterity' attitude, we have debts to and will leave legacies for people who will perhaps never know our names or where  we fit on their genogram.  I have just begun reading my fraternity brother, Charles Price's book, Nor the Battle to the Strong.  Though the genre is fiction, it is a thoroughly researched and well written narrative that gives tribute among others to a long ago kinsperson whose efforts helped 'make a difference'.  (And, that was neither a paid nor requested endorsement by Charles.)

      We also saw one other chimney on our explorations.  This one still has a house attached.  How long the house will endure, who knows.  I hope that what occurs within will 'make a difference' ---to those who are now there and to many who will come along when only a chimney is left standing.

    

                        Satchel