Originality & Inheritance

When my grandfather was a young man, he was in a near-fatal car accident. Against the odds, he lived, but his body was scarred and held together by an inner architecture of metal rods and pins. He walked with an encumbered limp, and I remember, as a child, thinking his gait looked painful. If it was, he never said it.

Because of his injury, he was ineligible for military service, so during the war, when he and my grandmother were young and newly married, he worked for the military building small air strips all across the country, to be used in the event we were attacked domestically.

This work enabled my grandparents to travel away from their small town and their families, to see places and meet people they wouldn’t have seen or met otherwise. When I was growing up, they spoke fondly of everyone they knew and lived alongside during that time in their lives, except for the story my grandmother told about living in a trailer in Oklahoma while pregnant with my mother, the blistering heat, and how she grabbed the handle of the trailer door unaware of the scorpion seated there, the searing pain of its sting, the red streak that ran up her arm, and how another woman in the trailer park treated the palm of her hand with a homemade ointment.

Read the entire essay at Creative Living Diaries.