Culture of One

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the woods with my family – my Mom grew up in an outdoorsy family in Montana and didn’t move to Spokane until she was in high school, and my dad (also a member of an outdoorsy family) lived in Couer d’Alene, Idaho until he met and married my mom. My mom’s parents have a small, two room cabin (electricity but no plumbing) in Montana and, as a result of a combination of my parents’ outdoorsy upbringings and the lack of money we had when I was growing up, almost every long weekend of my childhood was spent at the cabin. As a result, my younger sister and I became little girls who loved to play with Barbies… but who also loved to make what we called ‘scoob’ – glorified mud pies made with every ingredient that mother nature had to offer cooked together over a campfire. Looking back on it, these longs weekends at the cabin (plus at least a week each summer and every Thanksgiving break) were the highlights of my childhood. They were times when I could be together with my mom, dad and sister and with my mom’s parents without the distractions of the tv, ringing phones, and the other distractions that the real world had to offer. It was also a time for me to do different activities with each member of my family – I have very fond memories of waking up just after it was light outside to go hiking with my dad, making scoob with my sister, having my grandpa teach me how to fly fish, my mom teaching me to make a campfire, and talking for hours with my grandma while we washed dishes together. Thanks to an ill-fated backpacking trip involving a run-in with a bear, activities like hiking and fishing aren’t high up on my list of things to do for fun anymore, but having them in my history makes me who I am today.

From what I have gathered during my time at college, most people do not spend nearly as much time with their extended family as I did with mine growing up. Both sets of my grandparents lived within an hour of us, so once a week my sister and I went to my paternal grandparent’s house to spend the day, and every Friday night we went to my maternal grandparent’s house to spend the evening while my parents did grocery shopping. I also have five cousins who are all very close to my age – during the summers, me, my sister, and the two cousins who are between us in age would cycle between my parent’s house, my aunt and uncle’s house, and my grandparents’ house. Where one child was, the rest of us were there too. Because I grew up so close to my family, I grew up wanting to spend time with my cousins, instead of making lots of friends at school. Even now, I would rather spend my time with one or two close friends, or with my family than I would with lots of strangers.

Until I was able to take AP classes in high school, I was always extremely bored in school, and hated it. I went to school in Medical Lake my entire life, and the school was so small that there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room for me to be challenged more than regular classes did. To combat this a little bit, my mom would give me projects to do that would challenge me in academic situations. One of these projects is the reason why I decided to become a history major: when I was 14, my mom and I completed a project about her family’s genealogy. All we had to go off of was a few stories, and a few names written on the back of some old photographs, but I signed up for a free trial on a genealogy website and dug until I found the ancestor who had first came to America at the turn of the century. I was so fascinated by this, that I decided to do the same thing with my dad’s side of the family, knowing even less than I did for my mom’s side (just some ‘I think my grandad’s name was…’ recollections from my dad). I eventually was able to piece together that side of the family’s story, tracing the Burris family back to the 1700s! I discovered that looking at old documents to piece together where I came from was incredibly fascinating, and discovered that I had a love for history – thus why I’m a history major today.