My father told me that a few generations back, his forebears got stuck with farmland near Lake Michigan. It wasn’t a marsh, but it wasn’t particularly good for growing crops, either.
They found someone who’d buy the place and moved west. Again.
Time passed.
My father’s father got hired at a construction site, working there until someone dropped a crane on him and several of his colleagues. Unintentionally.
I gather that the crane operator relieved the tedium of his job by what he might have viewed as a harmless drink or seven.
At any rate, folks were sorting the resultant mess out into live bodies, dead bodies, and inorganic debris when a rescuer noticed that one of the dead bodies was bleeding.
I haven’t verified this, but I’ve been told that dead bodies don’t bleed: and that this is why my father’s father got reclassified as not-dead. Under the circumstances, not being dead strikes me as good news. Moreover, most of him had been pulled out in one piece.
One of his legs, on the other hand, stopped being a leg somewhere above the knee. But medicos found enough extra skin to cover the stump. Which I’ll also see as good news.
If there’s a story about how he got equipped with a wooden leg, I don’t know it. But I do know that a knack for refocusing, plus maybe skills picked up in construction work — with a fair portion of determination — helped him make a living as a woodworker. And that’s another topic.
Meanwhile, that land near Lake Michigan changed hands quite a few times. Can’t say I blame the owners. It really wasn’t good farmland.
But if the family had somehow managed to hang on to it, they’d now own a sizable chunk of Chicago.
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I could try coming up with morals for my family’s stories: particularly how these ancestors avoided owning some of the choicest real estate in the Midwest. Maybe something along the lines of ‘wealth is a burden’, or this bit from Proverbs:
“It is better to be humble with the poor
than to share plunder with the proud.”
(Proverbs 16:9)
I won’t, since then I’d feel obliged to start talking about context. Which would involve Sirach 29, loans and neighbors, truth and beauty — basically, it’d be more effort than I’ve planned on for this week.
So here’s the usual link list of family-related good news and other experiences:
- “Cancer Followup Scan: Good News”
(August 20, 2024) - “More Family Health Issues, or, NOW What?!”
(February 7, 2024) - “Another Trip to the Emergency Room”
(May 15, 2021) - “A Family Visit is Still in Progress: Kids and Adoption”
(February 1, 2021) - “Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Hope”
I remember an uncle, specifically a cousin of my mother, having lost his leg in a road accident. Heck, he even does manual labor for a living! Though he’s more about furniture than about buildings. At the very least, he has a prosthetic leg helping him work. And it seems like your grandfather still managed to do quite a bunch of good even after the accident! Thank God Almighty very much for workarounds as well!
Amen to that! And yes – we/folks can find our way around a great many barriers – – I suspect that having family depending on us, and family to depend on, helps.