Tell Me Something Good

I Found a Lake by Rebecca Love

When I was taking the STO297 class, Creating and Telling Personal Stories, I wrote a blog post about how I lost a lake. This is my follow-up, because the lake has been found!

I wanted to tell a story about my paternal grandmother’s summer lake house in Connecticut. I very clearly remembered the body of water being called Pinehurst Lake. But when I was trying to do research to craft the story, I couldn’t find Pinehurst Lake. Not anywhere. I crafted my lake house story anyway, told it in class, and wrote my blog post reflection about the lost lake.

And though the Personal Stories class was over, I couldn’t let the missing lake go. The desire to craft a better story for my family gave me the motivation to start digging through half a dozen boxes of unorganized family photos hastily collected from my mother’s apartment when she passed away in 2016. I hadn’t been able to face those jumbled boxes of pictures for several years, but I knew there would be photos of the lake house in the chaos. Maybe I would get lucky and there would be signage in a picture, or my mother would have written a relevant caption on the back of a photo.

I didn’t get a definitive answer about the missing lake from the photos, but there were some clues, and I decided to bring the lake house pictures with me when I visited fellow storyteller and writer, Mindy Tarquini, for lunch.

It was Mindy who found the lake! It turns out that Mindy is a whiz at Ancestry.com, and she was able to find my grandfather’s obituary from 1958. And lo and behold – he was part of the Pinehurst Lake Association. It turns out that the body of water was renamed Hartland Pond, and that’s why I couldn’t find it.

I was thrilled to know that my often-faulty memory was accurate in this case. I was so deeply disappointed that I might never be able to take my husband and son to see this place from my childhood that meant so much to me. But now I have the lake back. I’ve even found a Vrbo house for rent on the same lake, just a few lots down from where my grandmother’s house was (https://www.vrbo.com/82175). I’m looking forward to a future family vacation there, swimming, canoeing, and fishing in the water from my childhood.

Storytelling and the wonderful people in our storytelling community gave me back a piece of my family history. Crafting my story for class, telling it, and getting encouraging feedback from my classmates changed me. I don’t know if I would have been so determined to keep pushing to figure out the lake mystery without that support. I truly appreciate all the gifts storytelling has given me.

The Sacred is Personal by Rebecca Love

When I signed up for the Sacred Stories class, I didn’t really know what I was in for. Would we be examining sacred texts from the major world religions and telling stories featured in those texts? Like examining living mythology? I had a lot of trepidation about what might be expected. Religion can be such a hot-button issue.

But what I found is that the sacred is highly personal and individualized. For some, those stories in sacred texts are very personal. Others find sacredness in remembering people who have passed on, or in sentimental objects, or in inspirational personal stories they’ve heard. Others are touched by traditional oral stories from many different cultures, and others feel a personal connection to the natural world around us.

The idea that what is sacred is flexible and defined by each individual gave me a sense of safety and belonging. I don’t follow an organized religion, so I was worried I wouldn’t really have a place in the Sacred Stories class. But after being immersed in so many ways to celebrate what is sacred to each classmate, I actually feel more connected. It’s that old power of story to build bridges and point out how humanity is more alike than different that I’ve seen over and over again in class.

I feel empowered now to use the word sacred in reference to myself and those ideas and memories that hold deep meaning for me.