In Search of the Past

This Easter holiday I traveled into the past with my mother and daughter. On Good Friday, we trampled among gravestones at an old Lutheran church in Trappe, Pennsylvania, looking for ancestors named Zoller and Allabach. The next day we drove almost 8 hours to Chardon, Ohio, to visit my last surviving aunt, 92 years old and in frail health. On our way home, my mother pointed out old homes and stores that once belonged to members of my dad’s family in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

I was looking for something I think I’ll never find—the unspoken secrets of my family, most of whom are gone. I caught glimpses of my grandparents in the stories from my aunt and gleaned a sense of the tensions that must have existed in a family where one side was well educated and the other rough hewn. But people choose to remember what they wish, and choose even more carefully about which they speak. And secrets remain perhaps as they are supposed to remain, guarded and hidden, protected in the quiet of the graveyard.

We had a great time, though, my mother and daughter and I. We crossed Pennsylvania from east to west and stayed at a delightful inn with delicious food. We shared a fabulous chocolate chip pecan pie on our first night in Ohio. We laughed a lot and slept late when we could, enjoying our time in pajamas. Our view overlooking the pond and golf course was lovely, and the light on Easter Monday when we left heralded springtime.

Yes, I journeyed into the past, but I think I discovered something more important: the present. The present day, this very day, spent with my mother and my daughter. No one can take from me the memory of this day, the memory of this trip.

Secrets there may be, for I have some, too. “But today,” as my former minister used to say, “well lived, makes every yesterday/A dream of happiness/And every tomorrow a vision of hope./Look well, therefore, to this day.”