ix: Foraging through Folklore
Nothing is lost Ella Leith My three-year-old niece recently learned about a long-dead historical figure, and asked her mother whether they could go to her house and meet her. “I’m afraid she’s not around anymore,” my sister said. “Oh.” The three-year-old looked downcast, then brightened. “Perhaps we could plant a tree for her.” This column is a bit of a departure from my usual folkloric foraging. Rather than reaching for archive recordings and centuries-old tomes, I’m looking to the immediate and intimate past— to family lore and traditions. Family lore can seem a bit frivolous; after all, families are only tiny communities, and they all have idiosyncratic things they do or say or eat— a particular meal on a particular day; a nonsensical saying attached to a daily ritual. Family traditions are usually short-lived, lasting one or two generations at most before they are replaced with new ones. Compared to the traditional practices and beliefs of much larger communities, with their parallels across continents and continuity across centuries, what makes these small rituals special? Folklorist Henry Glassie gives an answer: ‘the big patterns are the yield of small acts’ (1995:409). An individual family’s lore draws on and feeds into their surrounding culture. While people can be dismissive of their quirky
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household customs (“Oh, that? We always do that. Don’t know why!”), they often carry derivatives of them into the new families they establish— because not to do so would feel wrong, somehow. And all that elevates a habit into a tradition is the sense that it matters, even if no one can really explain why, together with the ongoing intention to repeat it. A tradition means something because there are memories attached to it, and there is reverence attached to those memories. Ten years ago this August, my father took his life. Each family member has had to find a path through the complicated feelings of the past decade; these paths intersect at particular times of year and in particular places and actions. The small traditions of commemoration that we’ve created are meeting points and way-markers in the passage of time, moving us from the scorched earth of immediate grief into something more generative. Most of our traditions centre on a tree: a young Field Maple (Acer campestre). We buried Dad at Sun Rising Natural Burial Ground and Nature Reserve, South Warwickshire, which nestles under part of the ridge of Edge Hill known as Sunrising Hill. In the fifteen years since it was established, swathes of young native woodland have grown amid wildflower meadows and open grassland. It has a pond, owl-boxes, bird-
