Life in a Family Museum

And a few writing updates

(Originally written in 1998 when I was 20-something years old. All of the items and houses mentioned in this column are now even older.)

My family saves everything. Yes, I know, you’re saying, “Oh, I know. So does mine.”


No. No. You don’t understand there is a newspaper in a box in my family’s barn that dates back to before the Civil War. My great-great-grandfather, Chester Cranmer, hand carved the table my grandmother sets her radio and her Tums on in the living room.

On my bookshelf sits a bear which my father had when he was little, my brother had when he was little, and I had when I was little. The bear’s probably over 40 years old.

Ole Harry used to choke out a little growl for me when I tipped him forward or backward, but now he just stares with the wisdom of an old bear. That poor bear has seen everything and been to many places with me.

I remember lugging him to school for show and tell one day in a new suitcase my aunt had given me. I treated him like a relic, sliding him from that bag with such careful moments, cradling him gently for all the class to see. I doubt any of them cared. To me, though, this bear was special, a link to the past. If only he could speak. What could he tell me about my dad, about my brother, about the Vietnam War or JFK’s assassination, about anything before I was born? I’ll never know.

What I do know is the way I handled Harry was the way I had to handle a lot of what I came in contact with when my family and I moved into my grandmother’s house across the creek from my old house, approximately two years ago. What I live in now is not a house but a museum.

I already knew about old things before I moved to Grandma’s. I mean after all, I lived in the old Grant homestead all my life, was told all my life the story of Mollie Grant Manley who carved her name on our living room window (at the time it was not our living room of course, but my great-grandparents) in the late 1800s with her engagement ring to see if the diamond was real. I was told the story of how the peony bushes next to the house had been there for over 100 years, which meant the house itself is over a hundred years old as well.

I knew the driveway in front of my old house used to be the original Route 220 and the spring next to it was used by passing travelers in horse and buggies and later the first horseless buggies.
I knew what it was like to live with family history but I wasn’t prepared for the delicacy of the items I would come in contact with when I stepped into Ula Robinson’s household.

Oh sure, I’d visited before, but how much trouble could I get in for a few hour visit?

Living here permanently would mean walking on pins and needles for the rest of my life. My only break would be the time I was away at college where anything could be broken without severing a sentimental attachment.

First, there is my grandmother’s bottle collection which lines the glass wall by the stairs, the wall I must avoid bumping into while I drag all of my belongings up the stairs. One wrong turn and my backpack will knock off my grandmother’s Heinz bottle dating back to between 1889 and 1910. There was the wicker chair in my room -- I'm just not good around wicker – it had a tag on it dating it to the early 1800s as if it were an item on an auction block. It had to be removed from my room because I continuously found myself tempted to step on it in order to hang a Brad Pitt poster up.

Wicker is not something that should be stepped on. Right now the chair has been replaced by a wicker rocking chair given to my family by Esther Vale, who originally owned the house.

As a child, I remember being told: “Don’t rock that chair too close to the wall, you’ll damage it! It’s an antique!” “Be careful with that ball, you’ll break Mollie’s Window!” Now I am told, “Your grandfather sat in that chair when he was a child.” Or “Be careful with that platter. That was your great-grandmother Grace’s!”

Or “I remember when your grandmother was stabbed in the leg with that pitchfork.”

Or “I used that stick to turn my clothes in my wash basin before we had working washers.”

Obviously, it makes me nervous living in this house of antiques. Sometimes I feel on edge, not knowing how careful to be with something I discover in the room I now sleep in, which used to be where my aunts Doris and Eleanor slept, never knowing if it might have been carried, worn, or played with by one of my ancestors. At the same time, though, living in my family’s own private museum reminds me what I am a part of; what my personal heritage is, and that these antiques represent the memories of a past that shaped a family, a community, and maybe even a nation.

That old black, worn, leather case one of my ancestors carried letters in during the Civil War – how many men did he save by delivering a letter from a loved one asking them to hold on just a little longer?

My great-great uncle William Grant – how many stories, poems, and family history did he write to remind us of what it was like to live before television, electric lights, computers, and VCRs? He brought alive to my family a Scottish heritage that dates back to the time of William Wallace.

It might be a hassle to handle that photo, that book, those postcards, those photo albums, that bottle with the care you might give a newborn baby, but it’s worth it.

For in my hand is history, life, a past, is me.

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Original copyright The Daily/Sunday Review August 9, 1998

In writing and book news

In writing news I am working on Cassie, the book I am writing as part of a Christian fiction/romance book series. The first book in the series, Polly by Naomi Musch, will release Tuesday, January 15 and another book will release each month for the next 11 months. You can pre-order the first book HERE. https://www.amazon.com/Polly-Apron-Strings-Vintage-Romance-ebook/dp/B0CK5G8J12/ref=sr_1_1?crid=13WYKOJXULCO2&keywords=polly+by+naomi+musch&qid=1704851409&sprefix=polly+by+na%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-1

If you’re curious what Cassie will be about, here is a quickly written description:

It’s 1995 and 32-year-old Cassie Mason is an actress who made it big on a sitcom in the mid-1980s but hasn’t been able to find a job since the show ended five years ago.

After being fired by her talent agency, Cassie takes her sister Bridget up on her offer for Cassie to come back to their hometown for an extended visit to unwind and regroup.

While there Cassie finds out her younger sister – the one with the handsome husband and three kids and running a farm – is going to open a café and farm store in the small town they grew up near. Cassie decides to stay long enough to help with the grand opening, though she isn’t sure what she can do since she doesn’t know a thing about cooking like her mom and sister and isn’t great at organizing either.

In fact, Cassie isn’t sure what’s she is good at other than acting. Bridget hasn’t been able to help out at the Berrysville Community center like she’d like to with all that has to be done to open the business so she asks Cassie to fill in for a couple of volunteer opportunities. That’s when Cassie finds out that her sister’s neighbor, Alec, isn’t only a small farmer – he’s also someone who knows how to cook and showcases those talents in a weekly cooking class at the community center.

During her visit home Cassie struggles to figure out not only where she fits in and feels most at home but also to figure out if acting is all she is meant to do with her life or if there is another way God wants to use her talents.

And God? There’s someone else she needs to learn more about on this break from the career she thought she’d always have.

Look for the book August 15, 2024. Watch for a cover reveal in May!

Gladwynn Grant Mysteries Book Two Now Available

In the meantime, the two books in my Gladwynn Grant Mystery series – Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing and Gladwynn Grant Takes Center Stage -- are available in paperback on both Barnes and Noble and Amazon. They are available in ebook form on Amazon via Kindle Unlimited only at this time.

They will be available in ebook form on other sites in the spring and may go back into KU in the fall.

If you would like to read the first two chapters of the first book, you can find those HERE. https://lisahoweler.com/gladwynn-grant-gets-her-footing/

For a sample of the second book you can click HERE: https://lisahoweler.com/gladwynn-grant-take-center-stage/

Personal Updates and what I’m reading:

It’s been very snowy and cold where we are. We had a snowstorm last weekend, rain and the threat of flooding two days later and now we’ve been thrown into a week of arctic temperatures.

How is the weather where you are?

I am reading a couple of advanced copies of books, including Dysfunction Junction by Robin W. Pearson. The book will release on February 6.

Here is a quick description:

When three women receive an unexpected phone call that leaves them reeling, they have no other choice but to reckon with a lifetime of memories they’ve long tried to bury. Only in facing the past will they find their path forward.

Frances Mae Livingston’s firm grip of her family’s destructive history makes her hold her husband and four children even closer. But she’s losing bits of herself while proving to everybody and her mama that she’s enough. There’s no way she’ll repeat her mama’s mistakes, even if it kills her.

Annabelle McMillan didn’t have trouble kicking the Eastern North Carolina dust off her feet. The tough part was replanting herself in familiar soil. Now she’s blending her old life with her new husband, stepson, and unborn child. And battling old memories of abandonment and new fears of rejection.

Dr. Charlotte Winters has built a career around helping others sort through their emotional baggage. She’s also spent a lifetime refusing to unpack her own. So what if Charlotte doesn’t recall all that her mama did to her and what her daddy didn't do for her? Her only mission is to help others help themselves…until the women from her past and the man in her future undo her well-sewn life.

At the junction of healed and hurting, broken and whole, and past and present, three women wrestle with their inability to forgive and forget in this riveting Southern family drama about sisterhood from award-winning author Robin W. Pearson.

You can pre-order it here: https://www.amazon.com/Dysfunction-Junction-Robin-W-Pearson/dp/1496453778

I hope to be more regular with my updates this year so I hope to see you here again in February.