The Sadness of Tumbleweeds

By Bob Ferris

Tides ebb and flow.  A little more than three years ago there were four males in my line with the last name Ferris and now with the recent passing of my older brother William Ramsay Ferris Jr. there is just one: Me.  I am wrestling with how I feel about this and it is more complicated than simple loss.

From 2014 with my father and brother in the last photo of all three of us.

Certainly all of these passings in relatively quick succession have affected me and that is not helped any by a political and climatic landscape we now find ourselves in that speaks more of end-of-times than vibrancy and optimism.   The processing of this grief is not ameliorated at all while sucking wildfire smoke, watching dismal weather radars, combating Russian bots, and witnessing the potential collapse of the New World enterprise that our collective family has fought for and then served in various capacities for nearly four hundred years.

My father, uncle, brother, and I were dropped from similar genetic molds, but we differed in beliefs, experience, education, and interests.  We did hunt and fish together and we four also held tight to history and family both current and long past, but we were literally and figuratively all over the map.

We were all also named for those in our Morris and Ramsay lines which adds another onion skin to this complex, because my older brother was also the keeper of much in terms of family history and memorabilia.  This will come to me and I have no children myself and limited space in my retirement downsizing to accommodate walls, bookshelves, file cabinets, or other functional equivalents of family museums.

The garage office I am building for writing and perhaps processing what material might come.

While I am anxious to get the genealogical materials assembled by my grandmother Edna Robb Settles, I fear that some of the other materials will be much more like the links in Jacob Marley's chains.  So blessings and burdens both.  It makes me feel a little like a farmer who no longer has a farm, but will soon have bags and bags of seeds some of which are a couple of hundred years old.  This farmer challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most who care about farming in this sense are old like me and also have their own seeds.  And the younger ones seem to care little about farming.

There are reasons why these roots mean less.  For instance, my father and uncle were born in New York state, my brother in Florida, and I started life in California yet my father passed in Annapolis, my uncle in Atlanta, and my brother in San Jose while I now live in Eugene.  Yes, my two sisters and my mother live in Maryland and Virginia near where many of our lineages landed in the 1600's, but all three of them where born in California.  Moreover, my wife and I have lived in Eugene for six years but we have moved seven times in our nearly fifteen years of life together.  In short, we were once a family of trees that now more resemble tumbleweeds.

I bemoan the fact that my nieces and nephews seem to care little about things genealogical or family history, but I suspect that it is hard to truly appreciate family trees and roots when we are rarely anchored to a hometown and are so constantly moving.  I loved my grandfather and father, but it has been more than forty years since I visited my grandfather's grave in Palo Alto and I have only visited my father's once since his ashes were placed in Arlington.  Neither neglect springs from apathy or paucity of feeling, I think of both most days.  But tumbleweeds tumble...sadly.

Me walking in the Warren, Vermont 4th of July parade with some of my "children" and the Ferris Wheel they built.  

But all is not sadness for as tumbleweeds tumble they drop seeds.  I recall sitting with a group of interns at an informal gathering in a past professional incarnation when one of them asked me whether I had any children.  When I answered that I did not she countered claiming that they were actually all my children.  It was a nice thought and I think that I will work to embrace it as I process the pile before me and that which age and circumstance has brought to us all.