Back to My Roots

I enjoyed a quick trip up to Sutherland and Linn Grove, IA, a couple of weekends ago while I was in Storm Lake, a drive of sorts back in time. I found my Hughes great-grandparents buried in Waterman Cemetery outside of Sutherland. My great-grandma Isabel worked for the postal service and was an award-winning quilter ... my great-grandfather Ben a self-taught homeopathic physician-of-sorts. I never knew Ben, and Isabel died when I was one. After Ben died, Isabel moved out to CA to live nearer to my great-aunt Ferrol and her daughter Sheryl. When I lived in CA five years ago and met Ferrol for the first time, she gave me a hand-made baby rattle she had found in a box of her mother's things. She hadn't known who the rattle had belonged to, but when she noticed it featured an embroidered L and H on two of its sides, she figured Isabel had made it for me ... and I got the gift 22 years later.


After finding the Hughes' graves, I walked down main street Linn Grove, a small town where my grandpa and great-aunt Ferrol grew up. I found a few folks fishing down by the dam, a shuttered grocery store, a small bar playing some lonely tunes, the American Legion and the post office in the same building, a water mill bearing the town's name, and the old telephone company with a scribbled sign on the front door announcing the present-day home of the town electrician. There are no gas stations or thriving businesses in the town, and the school Ferrol and my grandpa attended closed and consolidated eight years ago. I found a couple of churches and the water tower but didn't find the home (if it still exists) that my grandfather would have lived in as a child.


I heard stories most often from my grandfather about growing up in Linn Grove soon after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's well over a decade ago. The preserved, distant memories were the easiest for him to recall, it seemed. Linn Grove was always on his mind, and when he wandered away in the middle of one of the coldest February nights on record without hat or gloves two miles to a neighbor's home, he stated he was "going home to Linn Grove" when asked what prompted his walk. And as I walked and explored what is left of my grandpa's Linn Grove, I sure made a few folks pretty curious as to who I was and why on earth I was taking so many pictures.