We all carry inside us, the people who came before us.
I want to tell you about my Grandma Gladys. Everyone called her Dutch.
There is a quiet theater to the memory of her. This picture shows her with sixty years of living, rushing down the asphalt in a Corvair convertible, her hair caught in the wild draft of the highway.
There was a wildness beneath her stillness, a raw texture that felt both ancient and fleeting. "Dutch" was one of twelve—a farmhouse thick with breath, anchored deep in the rural Indiana dust. She was spun from that very soil, carrying a sharp, unpretentious grace that needed no defense. A woman who could bend low, whisper to the soil, and make the earth listen. Her touch was a quiet spell; everything she planted grew.
Saturday nights tasted like raw truth and unvarnished Stroh’s beer, under the dim, low-lit hum of the Eagles club. No filters. Sharp-witted and beautifully flawed, she loved with a heavy, magnetic weight that still anchors itself in the center of my chest.
She lived for many years after the Corvair blurred down those back roads. But time slips through our fingers. Now, the motion has stopped, leaving only the memories and pictures of my grandmother in my mind and heart.
This week, the last of the farm's light went out. Aunt Grace, my grandmother's sister left us at ninety-five. She was the final thread connecting us to that Indiana soil, the last of twelve children who once ran through fields that now feel thousands of miles and lifetimes away.
It is a strange sort of grief, a disconnection from the very place that held our beginnings.
The present feels like a shadow of what came before, a quiet ache for a time we can no longer touch. We are left holding the pieces of a past that has already moved on, listening to the soft, fading echo of a home that now exists only in our memories.
Sisters, Gladys and Grace
