Here I am, in this raging storm which shows no sign of stopping. But my little boat is snug and strong, and despite the massive waves we are riding out the storm, although sometimes we slide so far into the hollows of the waves that I think we never will emerge. But we do.

At the helm is my fourth great- grandfather Thomas Turner, a linen weaver, who sailed from Belfast Ireland on December 24th, 1766 when he was twenty-three. The promise of 100 acres in South Carolina took him across the Atlantic in winter storms. Ten years later, he would be fighting with the Revolutionary forces. 

By his side looking at the compass is my grandmother’s aunt and stepmother Carolina Margareta Brandt. She packed up her little son, my grandmother, and my great-uncle Henry and in 1886 left the croft in Skaraborg, Sweden. They sailed from Gothenburg to Denmark, then took another ship to Bremen, and then across the Atlantic to Baltimore and by train to the Twin Cities to join my great-grandfather. 

Below decks is my great-great grandfather James H. Crocker known for his carpentry; he has his tool box ready to make repairs. He was with the Georgia Infantry at Missionary Ridge, Reseca, Kenneshaw Mountain, and Atlanta, among other battles. 

 In the galley is my grandmother Milda Christina preparing supper. She came home to her Minnesota farm house one day to find her almost- ripe strawberries smashed into the ground by a sudden hailstorm. She was thirty-one when her first husband died of stomach cancer, one year and two months after their marriage, leaving her with a five month old baby.

And across the cabin is my great-great-grandfather James Porter Stockton, tuning up his fiddle because we need music in this storm. He survived the Battle of Vicksburg and spent the last years of his life playing the fiddle on his Arkansas porch. 

His wife my great-great-grandmother Rebecca Hendricks has her bag of herbs ready in case of sickness, though she could not save her two young sons from dying of pneumonia in the winter of 1876, nine days apart. 

My great-grandfather Dr. Jacob Thomas Crocker is there with his medical bag, too. He was a horse-and-buggy country doctor during the influenza epidemic of 1918, when over 7,000 people died in Arkansas.

The boat pitches and slides down another trough, then slowly climbs upward again. 

“This, too, shall pass,” they say to me, and I hear the fiddle music begin. 

 “We are our grandmothers’ prayers
We are our grandfathers’ dreaming
We are the breath of our ancestors…”

“We Are,” Sweet Honey in the Rocks