My family just returned from a reunion of my great-grandparents' descendants. My great-grandfather, Willard Smith, died before I was born. My great-grandmother, Florence Grant Smith, died when I was about two. Obviously, I don't remember them at all, but I love to hear stories about them and what remarkable people they were. One of their eight children was my grandfather, Briant Grant Smith. He passed from this life in early 2004, about a year after my grandmother.
Now my children are the ones with great-grandparents they barely remember. What kinds of things do I tell them? What is the essential part of their legacy they passed on? When I was nine or ten until I was in my later teens, my grandparents, Briant and Cecile Smith, invited my brother, sister, and me to their house nearly every weekend to spend the night. It was there that I learned to grind wheat for pancakes and bread, roll out cookie dough for gingerbread men, sew doll clothes and patchwork quilts, and play games that are still favorites today. They also passed on a love and devotion to the Lord that is now such an essential part of my character and my home.
I have thought a lot about the term “homemaking” and something my cousin said at another family gathering. He and his wife lived with and cared for my grandparents while my grandma was failing from cancer: “I always planned to buy their house when they were gone, but we lived there for several months after they both had passed. I realized the feeling in their home didn’t come from their house, it came from the spirit they brought to it.” The beloved house, filled with several generations of memories, no longer belongs to anyone in the family.
Homemaking is more than dusting and vacuuming; cooking and sewing aren’t quite it either; scrapbooking and crafting are nice but not essential; and I’m not likely to be found decorating for any holiday except Christmas. Really, the true art of homemaking lies in the ability to create an environment of love, peace, and unity within the members who live there. Generations from now, I hope that is the meaning that my posterity will attach to my life when they describe what I did for a living.
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Even though I don't have the depth of memories in that house that you do, Liz, I can easily say that few houses have felt like a home the way theirs did. I always loved being there. I was very much at home because of the way they loved me. What a blessing to have known their home. It has certainly become the blueprint for the home we live in.
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