I'm sitting in my home office having just gone back to my regular part time job at a local university.  The last three months I have filled in for a dear friend and co-worker while she bonded with her new baby.  I'm trying to get out of my funk (aka writer's block) as I "go back" to my old routine by showing up and writing.... and then starting over again, and again. 

A funny thought dawned on me as I thought about "going back": There is no going back. The last three months have pushed me vocationally, challenged me professionally, and made me start dreaming once more. It's hard to turn those voices off.

Although, it's not hard to want to settle into the comfortableness of predictability.  I am beginning to understand why people settle into a pattern for years on end - there is an ease to it.  And even though each year brings its own excitement and unexpectedness by nature of working with college students, I sense a tug out of the easiness.

My gaze wanders over to the back wall of my office where I keep relics, pictures, and notes I consider sacred. There is an old doll that belonged to my Grandma Louise (my namesake - Kristin Louise). It is from the early 20th century.  The dress is tattered, but the porcelain hands, arms and legs speak to a day when toys were harder to come by, thus treated with a certain sense of preservation.  It is the only item I have from this woman I never met, but according to my mother, I inherited more from her in my own personality.  

There is also a high school picture of my Grandma Rushforth.  Her name was Nita, although I never called her by her first name. The writing under her beaming face declares "School Days 1940-41."  You would never know from her jubilant smile that a war was going on in the world behind her.  The next five years would alter her reality forever (and my familial past) because she met my grandfather and after only weeks (practically hours, as family legend has it) married him. He left to fight in the Pacific only days later. 

He came back a jaded, worn man.  Scarred by only things one experiences in a war and took it out on an unassuming young wife who had worked in a logging camp while he was away. 

There has never been a lot said of that time.  But the questions I have now brew under the current of my own life.  I had my grandmother for 18 years.  Eighteen years where she got to know me, but I only understood her role as grandma - not as a woman who had seen the world through different eyes.

Now that I can see beyond myself, I ache to connect to these women whose blood runs in my veins. I want to know how they handled change, transition, family drama and celebration. I want to go back to a "simpler time," and learn what wasn't so simple about it.  It would be lovely to sit on the porch with my Grandma's sweet tea. She would brew it for hours in the brief Washington summers. The container had a red lid and stenciled lemons on the side. 

My young taste buds didn't understand the connection of sweet tea and her Southern past.  But now I would appreciate her time put into it; her saving of plastic ziplock bags and her hard headed beliefs that my parents didn't always agree with. I think I get that from her too. 

But we can't go back.  So I hold the doll, the picture and their DNA within me and try to move forward in the present by honoring the past. There is a sense of permission in knowing the past shapes you, but it does not hold you back.  

I don't think I would see eye to eye with my grandmothers on everything, but that doesn't mean I don't treasure the legacies they left me.  I often feel that they are cheering on the qualities in me that they passed on, intentionally or not, saying, "Yes, go after your dreams.  If for nothing else, for yourself and for us." 

If they knew anything, it was how fast time went by. My Grandma Louise died in open heart surgery before my mom even met my dad - it was a robbery of cruelest kind.  One that I think I need to grieve too.  So in a year when I'm trying to be okay with time; one where I don't want to show up in December wondering where the year went - I want to honor these amazing women by slowing down and remembering their beautiful memories.  Equipped with my inheritance of a strong-willed spirit, faithfulness, simplicity, and fierce loyalty, I will dream myself out of the predictable.

Pictures by Megan Lundgren - do not use without permission.