LaPaz Home Learning

This morning as I was preparing breakfast for the children and myself, I was thinking about history and time.

I was frying some bacon, making buscuits, and stirring gravy and I thought about all those women in the past who fried bacon, made biscuits, stirred gravy. An endless procession of bacon-frying. An unbroken history. Ancient women, colonial women, pioneer women, women of the world war eras, 1950′s women, modern women. Cooking over open fires, coal or wood-burning stoves, gas ranges, electric skillets. Frying spattering bacon until it is just crisp, adding lard to flour and gently rolling out the dough, methodically stirring the gravy to remove the lumps.

And all their children. The children they loved and lovingly fed in hopes that they would grow to raise their own families and feed their own children and renew the cycle of frying, rolling, stirring,feeding, loving.

Naturally one thinks of famous women like Martha Washington or Laura Ingals making biscuits, frying bacon, their lives forever set in ink and locked in time, living on to this day as inspiration and example. But what of all those other women? The ones whose lives never made it into a book or movie of the week? Her name and deeds are long forgotten by even her own descendants- the children of those children of those children in whom long ago all her hopes and dreams were laid. Whom she fed lovingly. For whom she fried and rolled and stirred.

I’m sure, like mine,  her life seemed long at the time. Like the days of stirring and frying would go on and on with no end in sight. And even after that distant end her children, at least would still be around. But looking back now, with the perspective of History and hundreds of years gone by, her time on earth was so very short. Such a tiny slice of history. Such a crumb.

And so are the lives of us all. Crumbs, really. But precious crumbs made from the hopes and dreams of our mothers and their mothers before, who stirred and baked and served them up warm and loving. And History is, really, a trail of crumbs. Tiny lives that seem so insignificant, but each leads to the next, marking a trail through time.

Women have always gone about the business of life, caring for their loved ones in rather ancient ways. Frying bacon, kissing boo-boos, tucking blankets in a little bit closer under tiny chins. And loving. Always loving and hoping for the future. That our children will some day have families of their own, to love, to feed, to dream and to hope. Precious crumbs, all.