I've never been one to apologize for getting emotional. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable and depends who you ask, but it is what it is. This isn't something I regularly focus on, but 2016 as a year has basically been a dumpster fire that provided me with a free license on unlimited feelings. It is not clear to me when this expires.

There is something to be said for the connection between drawing on emotional connections and the practice of being a historian. It's something I've spent a lot of time considering as I process my dissertation into a book manuscript and try to find the right balance between passionately telling the life-story of the woman I've invested my career to this point researching and letting my own emotions sink too far into purple prose. For me there's always been a deep connection between places and the emotional connections we develop to them and the way I see myself as a historian. For me, that means going to back to where I grew up, which as I've posted about, brings up a lot of conflicting emotions. I don't have any shame about having all the feels about this place.

I somehow knew, even as a child, that more than a small part of how I experienced life was very much shaped by the past. Maybe part of it was because we didn't have TV until I was 16, or the way my grandfather insisted on doing things like it was mostly still 1954. My earliest views on the world were shaped by Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy as much as they were by the fact that it was the 1980s.

But there was more to it than that. My grandmother, of whom I have very few photographs because she hated having her picture taken, came from a family of 13. Of her brothers and sisters, two never left the home they were born in, and her youngest sister, my great aunt Hazel, died there just before I turned 10. Cleaning out that house was something of an archaeological experiment, given the time the family had lived in it and the reality that they were what can only be described as hoarders - having lived through the Great Depression, they took saving things seriously.

It was in the midst of cleaning out that house that I came across a picture that fundamentally shaped the way I thought about the past, and contributed somewhat directly to my becoming a historian.

I found the picture wrapped in tissue paper, stuffed into an old cigar box in Hazel's bedroom. I assumed at first it must have been a brother - my grandmother had several relatives who served in the Navy during World War II, including a brother who died decades before I was born. I took the photograph and several others to my grandmother's house, and recall clearly asking about them. Some others she had explanations for, but this photo met with a somewhat terse response that made it clear our discussion of the subject was over.

"Hazel had several men who wanted to marry her," my grandmother informed me with a sigh. "But she never did, she just waited for that one to come back."

That was the absolute end of our talk about the matter. Several later attempts to pry for information led nowhere, and at the time I was too young to understand most of the implications. All I knew was that my great aunt Hazel died alone in her bed, having waited half a century for a man who never came home. If there was more to the story, my grandmother was careful to never share it, and by the time I was old enough to ask more questions, she was gone.

I started using the photograph in classes a few semesters ago as a way to convey to my students that individual human experiences are always at the heart of history, and that even when we discuss big topics like "World War II" we're really still talking about things that shaped the lives of ordinary people. I tell them what I know - that I have no idea who this guy is. Hazel would have been in her late teens during World War II, and the family lived about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It's conceivable she went there for a number of reasons, including volunteering for the Red Cross, which some other old papers in her things suggested she might have done. I don't know how well she knew this unnamed officer, but given the location it's likely he sailed for the Pacific Theater. Beyond that are a sea of possibilities. Maybe he was killed and she couldn't bear it. Maybe he went missing and she spent the next decades of her life hoping for an unlikely return. Maybe he did come back, but not to Hazel.

My students, inevitably, want answers, and realistically I could probably find them if I dug hard enough. But I'm not always sure that I want to. The unknowns in this story fit emotionally with the disconnect I always felt to Hazel, who rarely came to family dinners and who I'm not sure I ever heard speak a complete sentence. The mystery seems appropriate for the blank spaces I can't possibly hope to fill in for her life.

But back to the feels. Perhaps because I always felt growing up that I would never belong in the place I came from, I often found myself searching for a deeper sense of my own history. In some ways I feel that more acutely now that I've been away from this place for going on two decades and with all the legal wrangling it's tied up in, I really can't go home. There's a certain amount of clarity that comes from knowing that. Uncovering a real-life World War II mystery was one of the things that pushed me to study history as an undergraduate student, and I've carried that sense of searching for connections between place and personal history into my professional work on Montana. Perhaps the reason I connected so strongly to Virginia City in the first place, and to the story of a single woman living there, was because I felt that in telling her story, I might capture that sense of place and how it shaped a life in ways that I know I'll never figure out with my own family.  The historian in me wants to know. The rest of me prefers the mystery.

"Home" has always been sort of a sticky concept for me. As a historian, I'm interested in the role of place and space in making humans do what they do, and it probably has something to do with past experience. I have a place I grew up in, like most people, but I also have a deeply conflicted relationship with it. I have fond memories, but mostly I don't miss it. And no offense to Bon Jovi, but sometimes even when the place is still there, you can't go home.

I grew up in California, in a place that in some ways was amazing. My grandfather and great uncle, born to Sicilian immigrant parents in a tiny farming enclave south of San Francisco, worked their entire lives for the 1,200 acres they turned into Arata Brothers Ranch. During the Depression they grew pumpkins and started what can only be described as a craze. (Seriously...google it. There's even an annual festival now. I'm not going to post a link here because I sort of hate it). When the United States entered World War II, they expanded dairy operations, milking more than sixty cows twice a day, every day, by hand, working side-by-side like they did most things. My father was born in 1948, and by the time I came along he was farming hundreds of acres of hay, wheat, and barley while my grandpa and great uncle continued milking a few cows twice a day, every day, by hand still side-by-side.

Some of growing up there shaped me in the best of ways. Grandpa loved horses, and with 1,200 acres at my disposal riding all day was an option. I explored canyons and trails that sparked my imagination, collected arrowheads that hinted at a much older history, and watched a hundred sunsets over the Pacific Ocean from the back of a horse. In the summers the hills bloomed with honeysuckle and sage, blood red Indian Paintbrush and delicate orange Poppies. There were old barns where we stacked hay bales thirty feet high, and sometimes when exploring them I'd find the worn initials of some earlier visitor carved into their timbers. It was picture-perfect and beautiful, and it inspired me.

That was part of the story. There was also the part where my father was a hoarder, and the house I grew up in deteriorated severely as I got older. There was the reality that despite my grandfather and his brother remaining partners in all of their work until my grandfather's death in 2005, the rest of the family didn't always get along. But most of all there was the somehow sickening knowledge from an early age that this place would never really be home. No matter how much I might have wanted to stay there was no future for me there, so when I was eighteen I left. And somehow I knew then that no matter where I ended up (Oklahoma, I assure you, was not on the radar, but God's sense of humor deserves its own post), I wouldn't be back. Befitting the size of this property, it's not all going to fit into one blog post, so I will leave this one at the set up:

Before my grandfather and great uncle died, they sold the development rights to the ranch to an open space trust. They wanted to preserve the place they spent their lives building something. Each of them left their heirs a trust with partial rights to the land. Ironically, the ranch stayed together, but in doing so it tore the rest of the family apart. My father spent his last ten years of life unwillingly engaged in numerous legal battles over how to part with it, with few good options. My grandfather and great uncle each owned half of the ranch, but because the development rights contained a legally binding clause about the property remaining in one piece, it had to stay together. Between the property taxes and the inability to make a living farming there, it was impossible to keep the ranch, but equally impossible to sell it, because that requires both parties who took over the original trusts to agree on things. Even the California court system has now officially ruled is impossible and we have been legally declared incapable of coming to an agreement...this is the most boring family feud in the history of family feuds and formally known as Arata et al vs. Arata et al (2014). Basically, neither of can afford to buy the other out, and neither of us can afford to stay there, so the state of California has armed us with a court-appointed mediator who gets to make decisions for us. He's a nice enough guy, and definitely deserves all the money we pay him to be a reasonable human being and put up with us.

A recent mediation over the property forced me to go back for the first time in about a decade and got both historian-Laura and grew-up-there-Laura thinking about how the places where we experience life shape us. I have avoided going back for a lot of reasons, but most significantly because there's the punch-in-the-face reality of what happens to a place when it's basically abandoned. I can't really explain what it feels like to see the literally shattered pieces of your childhood in that condition, but I will share it in a later post (please try to contain your excitement and/or morbid hoarders-style curiosity). It's a place that has impacted me in the best and worst of ways, and maybe that's why I feel oddly ambivalent about it. I knew it wouldn't feel like home anymore, and not just because on this trip I was surrounded by lawyers (it turned out to be a bonding experience) and communicating in mostly starkly legal terms. ("Yes, I do see that intensive environmental remediation work is needed at Assessor's Parcel No. 081-270-020. Can this be accomplished without threatening the designated Conservation Easement Area recorded as Document No. 2004220330 in the Official Records of the County?"*)

After two full days there it's still not really clear what I accomplished, but it did affirm for me that sometimes you really can't go home. Sometimes the place you came from just isn't home anymore, and it's a done deal. It's a place that you walk around with your lawyer and in between other people fighting about things, you point out the field where you remember riding on a tractor with grandpa and great uncle what feels like a hundred years or another life ago. Or it's a place where you unexpectedly find something that reminds you of something else, a memory you'd stored away, and it makes you cry. (If your lawyer is super nice he will tell you it's okay to be sad at this juncture. If he isn't...find another lawyer**). It's a feeling you won't be able to explain, but whatever it is, it definitely isn't something you're going to come back to except in pictures. It will be okay that you feel relieved knowing that isn't the worst thing.


(*Those are real numbers and things but none of that is actually correct. My lawyer might be amused, but definitely not impressed. Sorry, Sullivan).

(**Sullivan qualifies as a "super nice lawyer").

I will just go ahead and confess here that it has taken me a shamefully long time to convince myself that it was time to start blogging again. Partly because life gets busy, and when you're a baby assistant professor (in the first three years of a new position) and heading toward the jump toward reappointment (and an upgrade to toddler assistant professor) it always seems like there's something else you could be doing. Also....life is hard, and it just gets in the way sometimes. But after a 2 year hiatus and multiple self-promises to resume, here I am, wondering what to write about. Baby assistant professors, I think, often feel a certain compulsion to always have something profound and interesting to say, but for most of us this is not a realistic expectation. It's also really subjective, which I guess is sort of the point. At some point the realization hits you that if you wait to have the perfect fit of inspiration, the blog (or article, or book, or whatever) is going to go unwritten forever. This is not the way to approach projects or life in general.

So...I'm here to admit failure at giving in to that impulse, and commit to filling this space with whatever pointless, random, imperfect, and decidedly not profound things come to mind.

As part of the Digital History class I'm currently teaching (hi guys!) I've encouraged my students to make simple bullet lists of topics they might like to blog about during the semester. It's actually kind of impressive how inspirational a simple list can be, and this was by far the most enthusiastically received topic of discussion. It got me thinking about my own list, and in a broader sense the kinds of things that we deeply and personally connect with when we write about the topics that most closely speak to us. What do you choose when you're staring at a blank screen / page / typewriter (if you're a hipster)? The list I initially jotted down includes some things from summer travels and research (fear not, enlightening commentary about my recent trip to Paris and that one time when I jumped out of an airplane are in the works), but looking back over it I found myself a little surprised at how many things I feel like writing about connect back to places I thought I'd left in the past long ago.

Admittedly, I've been feeling pretty nostalgic lately. My father died in March, and it forced me to face up to the family past in some ways I wasn't totally expecting. I grew up on a ranch in California, and while the process of settling the estate it belongs to has been kind of a nightmare, it has also pushed me to look back on where I came from in some different ways. The historian in me is always in search of personal connections that bring the past into the present. It's easy enough to do this for my students, but surprisingly more difficult to process when it forces me to consider my own experiences. The enormity of the challenge sank in a few days ago as I walked a California dirt road for the first time in well over a decade, trying to come to grips with why it hurt so much to let go of a place that never felt like home to begin with. I have wrestled with whether or not and how much to post about things like this (how many feels are appropriate for this format?) but I figure that if I'm going to encourage my students to actively seek personal connections and incorporate them into their blogs because that makes good story telling, then it's only fair that I endeavor to do the same. Leading by example...the struggle is real.

Reality of the struggle aside, it's worth it, as most (even imperfect) things are.