Rediscover your roots

Every once in awhile a person should visit his or her roots.

I did so a couple of weeks ago, returning to Palouse, Idaho, where I was born and raised.

It was the annual Palouse Days celebration, which occurs on the second weekend of September.

It provides an opportunity to see old friends, and to visit familiar surroundings.

What is it with Palouse you ask?

Well, I still consider it home.

It doesn’t provide me the opportunity to see old classmates. Most of them are gone now. We graduated a class of 24 back in 1948. I only know of three, including myself, still hanging around.

For me, a visit “back home” means a visit to the cemetery where my parents and several grandparents are buried. Then it includes driving by the different places I lived there. I was born on a farm a few miles out of town, and delivered by my aunt while my dad was going to town for the doctor.

This year was more special because I had arranged to meet one of my classmates, Betty Jean Seeney, who started the first grade with me but moved away in our junior year. I had been asked to drop her middle name, but it just seems to crop up. We had last seen each other in 1947.

That’s what Palouse does to you.

I also get to see Janet (St. John) Barstow, the daughter of another classmate, Don St. John.

She runs the local museum there, a treasure trove of articles and old pictures, plus a gathering of printing equipment, which Janet’s husband Ben manages to coax to work.

I loved growing up in Palouse, even though it was during the great depression. We didn’t have much, but what we didn’t have the town seemed to produce.

It is truly like going home.

The town of about 1,000 looked like it would respond to the death knell, but a funny thing happened. The young set, endowed with energy and a love for the place, dug in their heels and went to work.The town’s Halloween scare house raises some $60,000 each year, and a new community center was built.

The town elected a young mayor who helped the effort along. Now the town is alive with hope and enthusiasm.

In the museum is some tile work from the Oasis, a restaurant where I fry-cooked. So never accuse me of not knowing how to boil eggs.

The town is filled with fond memories of the time I was growing up.

The Palouse River runs through the middle of town. I remember responding to the rubber drive during World War II, when I pried old rubber tires from their resting places and sold them during the rubber drives.

It’s that sort of thing that memories are made of.

So I would encourage one and all to find your “Palouse” and return there as often as you can.

Rediscover your roots and, in doing so, discover something about yourself that is unique to your own being.