{"id":1357,"date":"2009-09-07T13:08:47","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T19:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/?p=1357"},"modified":"2009-09-07T13:08:47","modified_gmt":"2009-09-07T19:08:47","slug":"uncles-death-and-a-sense-of-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/?p=1357","title":{"rendered":"Uncle’s death and a sense of home"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re having another funeral in my family and with it the passage of the generation before mine continues.<\/p>\n

My uncle with his puns and quirky jokes is gone. I will miss him. One of those jokes, a typical one, I remember he told me when I was little\u2014\u201cHide, hide, the cow’s outside.\u201d I took me quite awhile to get it.<\/p>\n

Those memories of my childhood, looking up to the adults, my mother and father, my aunt and uncle; and fun, worry-free times with my brothers and all my cousins and relatives\u2014that family has changed. <\/p>\n

Now I am more and more the senior generation, the mature generation. I always thought of myself as middle-aged, but as Meryl Strap said to Shirley MacLaine in \u201cPostcards from the Edge,\u201d \u201cHow many 120-year-olds do you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

I called my uncle my biggest fan because when I came back here to write for the paper he would comment about how many stories I had in each issue. He called it the Judy Gibson Events.<\/p>\n

What a privilege it is to live in a place where my family is around me, where we are together, in sickness and health, in birth and death. Just a few weeks ago I was writing here about a brand new baby who was the most recent of his great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n

When I visited England a few years ago I remember feeling impressed with the sense of history there\u2014how old it was, the sense of things in a continuum through many ages. America seemed young and brash in comparison.<\/p>\n

But here in the Wisconsin Dells area many of us have a sense of history, of deep roots from ancestors who came here as immigrants generations ago. When I decided to move back here from New Mexico my friends there told me they were jealous that I actually had a \u201chome place\u201d to go back to. Santa Fe, like many places, has a big population of newly arrived people, many of
\nwhom do not stay long. I also had an Ojibway friend in Minneapolis who said it is natural to heed the call to return, eventually, to where one was born.<\/p>\n

So, as sad as this death is\u2014the passage it marks for all of us\u2014I treasure all the time I have had here. Although I didn\u2019t grow up here my Dad did, my grandparents were always here, and times spent in the Dells as a child are some of my fondest memories. My uncle was a part of that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jan. 19, 2002
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re having another funeral in my family and with it the passage of the generation before mine continues. My uncle with his puns and quirky jokes is gone. I will miss him. One of those jokes, a typical one, I remember he told me when I was little\u2014\u201cHide, hide, the cow’s outside.\u201d I took me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1360,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions\/1360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rockaria.net\/bluebirdprairie\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}