Agnes my asparagus fern is safely indoors for the winter and it’s a good thing. Temperatures are dropping and although the sky is a beautiful, clear blue and the sun looks warm against my neighbors’ houses, it is a chilly morning. Fall is here and frost isn’t far behind.
Yesterday was not so–it was a rainy, shivery day and the wind blew like a storm. Very strong gusts with rain rattled chairs and table on the deck. But, safely inside, with the fireplace blazing away, what better time to go with my granddaughter back into the pages of history on a genealogy hunt? So, that’s what we did.
My granddaughter has done an intensive search of ancestry that took us, following one particular family line, back and back, generations and centuries slipping past, until we reached Wales in the Middle Ages. That’s a lot of time travel for a stormy autumn day in twenty-first century Arkansas. But, what fun! So, of course, I was compelled to look up what Wales was like at that time, the clothing and the daily life of the Welsh people. Although they lived in a beautiful country, life was pretty grim and pretty uncertain, even for the upper classes. But, amidst all that, we had an ancestor or two or more and that was wonderful to know.
I wonder what kind of story could be spun from those ancient threads of ancestry? People in those days had pretty much the same emotions as we do today and although their problems may have been different, there must have been unsolved questions and riddles. Surely, there is material there for a writer to fabricate a fascinating tale of fiction mixed with history and come up with a cozy mystery!
People in the old days didn’t have the luxury of electricity and plumbing not to mention modern cooking devices, heat, air conditioning, TVs and computers. Times sure have changed!
Yes. They’ve changed in many ways.