Follow the memories back to Mom at her sewing machine, and Grandma fashioning home-made dolls and stuffed fabric frogs. Oh, that takes me back to stories of Grandma as a child just after the turn of the 20th century and her tales of floods, flu epidemics, and such everyday childhood escapades as singing out doodlebugs and locking old Granny Manny in the privy.
Just the other day, on our trip to visit my parents, an amazing tidbit--one I'd never heard before--came to light when my dad (now in his late 80s) mentioned that his great-grandmother was a cook on a canal boat. The canals were a series of waterways wide enough for boats. The Ohio-Erie Canal linked New York to the Ohio River, and was used from the 1830s to the 1850s to transport goods and produce to market, before the advent of the railroad. The boats were pulled by mules that trudged alongside on the banks.
Though I've always been interested in history, especially local, I never was much interested in the canals--until it became personal. Now I think: "There must be a story here!"
Story. A family of six living in a hollow sycamore tree in 1800? There must be a story there (the book I'm finishing up on now). A barn with the number 1861 welded in wagon wheel rims and mounted above the large door? There must be a story here (book 2). A young girl (later to become my grandmother) rescued out a second floor window into a johnny boat to escape the flooded house? There must be a story here (book 3). And now who was this woman who cooked on the canal boats? Is there a story here?
Stories are everywhere. May we turn our ears to them, pluck them out of the air, get them down on paper, write them the best we can. And hopefully stir, inspire, entertain, uplift, (fill in the blank with your vision) our readers as we go.
Sycamore trees, barns, doodlebugs and dotted swiss are some of the things that have sparked my ideas. What has sparked yours?
