Family Legacies

I met two of my cousins this weekend at our grandparents family farm in West Texas. The new owners said they were tearing down the rock house as it has had no occupants for over a decade. My grandfather “Pampaw” build it by hand with rocks he had drug out of the creek with his mules and hauled them up to the site in his wagon. December,1934, was written in the porch mortar. The idea it was being torn down was unfathomable.
My mother and her three siblings grew up in this house, working the dry West Texas land and walking to school over a mile away. She left to become a nurse, returning to marry my father at the church up the road and celebrating the reception in the front yard. In the picture from 1949 they all looked so young and full of promise. I stand now on that very spot, all from that photo now gone or quite aged. And now the house to be gone too, swallowed back into the fields my grandfather created. Dust to dust.
As we hug and part, I stop at the church and look back. The house impossibly small against the sea of the endless plain. But, oh, what a legacy it leaves. Four new families with homes and children of their own, grand and great-grandchildren, all bright and strong as the stone house from which they came. I begin the long drive back, remembering. I have claimed a stone from the foundation to keep and pass on, a tangible connection to this, the foundation of our family.