How I Got Here...Back Where I Started

I've never been one to journal, but anyone who knows me will agree that I have plenty to say. Mostly, I'm full of the stories I've heard from family, friends, and people I've met and interviewed during my 37 years living on the Eastern Shore. I grew up surrounded by my family's history, from the Victorian house built by my ship's captain-great grandfather in 1887, to the little Methodist church with my ancestor's names emblazoned on the stained glass, to the family graveyard(s) where I routinely played (yes, played) as a child.


My grandmother, Cleora--a powerful, loving, giant of a woman--loved to tell stories about her days on the farm, to sing songs and to play cards and dominoes as they always did during the slow days of winter. By the time I reached high school, I was bursting with her tales, determined to become a novelist. I was already an avid genealogist by this time, and found it easy to trace my family's history since they'd been in Dorchester County and on the Shore since 1659! But names on a page proved unsatisfying to me...I wanted to know who these people were, how they lived, what was important to them.

I went off to Washington College in Chestertown, and by my senior year set about writing the great American novel in a third floor studio of the Literary House--I was Jo from Little Women. My novel, ironically, was about a young woman trapped and tormented by the traditions of her Eastern Shore home. Not exactly autobiographical, but I had that desperate need to show that I was more than just a girl from the 'Shore, part of the first generation to go off to college. My writing adviser called my stories of local life "dead wood." He wanted me to write something contemporary. I didn't think I could, or wanted to.

My novel failed to win me the coveted Sophie Kerr Award , while my senior thesis about the Federalist Party in Maryland (snore) earned me a history award. So I went with my backup plan: history. In graduate school at the University of Delaware, I rejected the academic track to specialize in museum studies. I gravitated toward research and writing, even though my professors wanted me to go on to teach. But I had a strong desire to make history as compelling to the general public as it was for me. Tamara Hareven, the prestigious family historian for whom I was a research assistant, once said to me in horror, "You're going to give tours?!"

After graduate school, I landed the perfect job as curator at the Delaware Agricultural Museum & Village in Dover. I was in my element, responsible for interpreting and furnishing 17 historic buildings taken from sites throughout Delmarva, including a farmhouse and a country church. As I researched the farm implements in the exhibit hall, I gained a new understanding of the physical labor it entailed for my ancestors to till, plant and harvest the land. Their daily activity, I learned, was connected to the cycle of the seasons. Each month brought new bounty from the garden, and new work to be done.

As my mother will tell you, I hated to garden as a child. Although I remember having my own plot with carrots or radishes or some such vegetables as a small child, by the time I was a teenager I had a deal with my mother that I would clean the house or cook if she would not make me weed. These days, she receives endless delight from the fact that I'm obsessed with gardening. I'm sure she'd always wanted to share with me the joy that comes from sweating over the soil and bringing forth edible treasures. That is her heritage too, after all, and she never left it behind.

These days, as I prepare my loamy Cecil County soil for planting, it occurs to me that I never really rejected my heritage either. I've studied it, explained it, novelized it and honored it. Ultimately, I think that is my goal. To honor my rural roots by understanding it to the fullest extent possible, planting some of the crops my grandfather planted, using the tricks my mother taught me, feeding my family the fruit of my hard work. I don't think life gets any better.


Photos: My family home in Church Creek, my grandmother Cleora Willis Brannock, a walking cultivator from the late 1800s, the Willis family on their farm in the 1910s.

© Jenifer Dolde, 2008