Giving the Gift of Story: Spoken Treasures for the Family By Robin Moore
country, where my grandparents had a cottage on the shores of Silver Lake. The summer months were an unending stream of swimming and canoeing and bare-foot lightning bug-catching, way past dark. There were also endless days and nights of storytelling. When you live on a lake, you get lots of relatives visiting, and a boy could learn a lot about the family by hanging around and listening—especially when the adults thought you weren’t. Because the cottage was small, we kids slept in sleeping bags
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on army cots set up on the screened-in porch by the lake. Night after night I feel asleep to the sound of my relatives’ voices, rising and falling on the summer air, their laughter drifting like mist across the lake.
In my mind, family vacations and the telling of family stories are intertwined so closely that you can’t have one without the other. If you feel the same way, or if this sounds good to you and you would like to start a family storytelling tradition, here are some ideas to prime the pump and get the ball rolling.
hen I was a boy growing up in Central Pennsylvania, every summer my mother would pack up the station wagon and drive all five of us kids 100 miles south, far out into the
Start at the Beginning One of the best ways to get started in family tales is by telling
birth stories. We kids never tired of hearing my mother tell each of us about the day we were born. My own kids loved hearing over and over about the harried trips to the hospital and the rush of relief when the new arrival came slipping and sliding out into the world. I feel that one of our jobs as parents is to keep our children’s stories for them until they are old enough to carry them on their own. And one of the most important stories you can know is the story of your own birth.
An added bonus: if you would like to publish your birth sto- ries on the web or read those of others, visit
www.birthstories.com. You can enter your stories there and read the birth stories of others, recorded by category (longest labor, shortest labor, funniest, etc.) Before you know it, everyone will start chiming in with interesting versions of the big event, demonstrating once again that there is always another side of the story!
The Time of Your Life Time is a tricky thing. Geniuses from Plato to Einstein to Miss
Piggy have tried to figure it out and all come away scratching their heads. A wise person once said: “Time is just nature’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen at once.” One way to get a handle on time is to look at the events of your life using a LifeRope. This is nothing more than a length of rope with colored pieces of ribbon or yarn marking the important events of your life. The idea itself is pretty simple: Beginning with your Birth Story, make a timeline on paper of the important events of your life. Lay these out on a length of rope with colored ribbons marking each event. As each person makes a LifeRope, stories will naturally come up. When you have them completed you can spread them out on the floor so that your child’s birth date falls on the spot on your rope where you marked the event of their birth. What you will end up with is a fascinating (and very tactile) representation of your family’s life through time. For complete instructions, see my book “Creating a Family Storytelling Tradition.”
38 Natural Nutmeg
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