My Grandpa lives in a little brick house in a small town in Kansas. Just outside of town is the land where his grandfather first built a Kansas homestead. Grandpa has driven us grandkids around on those dirt roads in Kansas and showed us that old homestead. On that homestead lay the ruins of the old dugout home. There stands the two remaining walls of the old stone house, a record of the hand-built past. There lays the grave where our ancestors’ little boy lies buried, a monument to how difficult those first years on the prairie were for them. In addition to the stories and the land, there are boxes of old things in my Grandpa’s attic. Grandpa’s attic holds letters my ancestors wrote and objects they held, records of their handwritten past.Continue reading “The Handwritten Past”