I am thrilled to have been asked by Allyson Latta, a writer and facilitator whom I admire tremendously, to contribute to her website by writing a blog post describing 7 Treasures. Allyson specializes in memoir, and reading the contributions listed on her site was both humbling and inspiring for me. Here is her web link. Allyson couldn’t include all of the photos, so I’ve posted them here.

allyson latta tweet

Of course, I emailed the link to members of my family. My son, who is in the photo of my Mom wearing the superman sweater, was touched. My daughter-in-law, granddaughter and brothers want more stories. I have several Rubbermaid boxes and half a dozen albums crammed with photographs, letters and greeting cards dating back to the 1940s, so I have my work cut out for me. What’s intriguing is that my brothers and I have quite different recollections of some the same events.

The younger people in the family love hearing us talk about our history whenever we get together – everyone calls it ‘Miller time’ now. They want to know our history. We’d better get busy before our memories start to fade. A family book of recollections sounds like a great idea – but of course, as the eldest, I’ll have to take the lead.

Four siblings, children, grandchildren, cousins, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends. We’re noisy, articulate folk who can easily maintain three or four simultaneous conversations, which my Swedish husband just can’t understand. Perhaps it’s a socio-cultural thing. We grew up in Quebec, so I suppose we’ve absorbed some of that Gallic expressiveness. Coming from a raucous, talkative family, where family was/is everything and most of our celebrations happen over the dining room table, with copious quantities of food and drink, if you can’t carry on more than one conversation at a time – listening to this one, chiming in to that one, disagreeing with that opinion – then you won’t survive. Might as well go sit in a corner with a book. No one would mind, but the conversation cluster just might shift in that direction!

It’s not as if I need another project. And sorting through decades of memories sometimes makes me weepy and contemplative, but it’s a worthy legacy, I’m sure. There are so many folks today who have no sense of where they came from. It’s reassuring to know that my brothers and I can do something about that, in our family, at least. Even better, we’ve all inherited the creative gene – art and writing and conversation – so the task won’t be onerous. It’s a matter of finding the time.