The virtual family

All day today I watched a cloud hang over Roanoke.  In the morning I thought it was just fog that would dissipate.  It was still there late in the afternoon.  The cloud over Roanoke is a pretty good metaphor for many modern families.

We know our family members are out there in fog, but mostly we aren't close enough to be in the same fog, and communications between our respective fogs have evolved and changed in this digital world.

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, I lived on Styers Street.  Styers was my mother's maiden name.  My Uncle Joe Styers lived behind us and across the street was his daughter.  Great Grandma Styers lived in a little house behind Uncle Joe, who only had one arm, the other having been lost in a sawmill accident.  We lived in Forsyth County not far from the original Styers Ferry which brought people across the Yadkin River from Yadkin County. 

On Sundays after church we would pile into my mom's blue 1952 Ford and drive down old US 421 over the Yadkin River bridge to my Aunt Molly's house which was between Yadkinville and East Bend, NC.  It was a pleasant drive through the agricultural fields.  It was also going home for my mom, whose father had run a mill on a small stream not far away.  I talked about this family milling tradition in another post, "Reconnecting with the past, the Shore-Styers Mill in Yadkin County." Our family has deep roots in North Carolina and especially Yadkin County.

Aunt Molly's house was a gathering spot for the clan. She had six children and her youngest was very close to my age so I was almost like a seventh child.  My mother had been an extra mother to the other six so it sort of made sense.  Under the shade trees we would have watermelon and sometimes something as exotic as homemade peach ice cream, but mostly we ran and played, and when exhausted listened to the stories of our elders.  People didn't have cell phones, but I think they knew more about each other than we do today.

The time that we spent together then was worth a million instant messages and several thousand cell phone calls made while driving in a parking lot.  No one had iPods to drown out the conversation and there were no computer games to keep the kids inside.  It was a different time and place.

There wasn't even air conditioning. We were grateful for the shade trees, the iced tea and sometimes lemonade.  Once in a while we managed to get there on a day other than Sunday.  Then it was a two minute stroll to Brown's Store, where the sodas were five cents, and you could get some fine cheddar cheese to go with your crackers.  You would probably find some of the men playing checkers and none of them checking their email on their Blackberries.  My Aunt Molly married Austin Brown who was also a miller.

Today, we have all sorts of ways to communicate, but sometimes I am not certain we hear each other.  As I grew up and went away to military school for high school, I learned to write a weekly letter home. It was graded and always had a few red marks.   Still it wasn't how I communicated.  I developed the habit of calling home every Saturday.  It was a rock to lean on, knowing that on Saturday or sometimes Sunday, I would hook up with the family.

As the years passed, email worked its way into my life and then instant messaging.  I have resisted the Blackberries and even text messaging.  I'm not sure the communication is better even though there is much more of it to manage.  When the first of my college friends died, I was moved to write an article, "Death of a friend." I vowed then not to let email keep me from connecting with people who have been important to me.  I've done a pretty good job even though it has added a lot of miles to my life.

Still geography poses great challenges, not many people are like two of the daughters of my Aunt Molly.  They married two Hennings brothers and live on Hennings Road in Yadkin County surrounded mostly by their children.  Most of us face large distances and digital communications have become a crutch we lean on regularly.

My blogs are sometimes read by my children and more often by my friends who use them to keep track of me.  I keep in touch with my son mostly through instant messaging early in the morning before all the servers he manages start needing attention.  Our whole family swaps digital pictures and emails.  I often put up websites with family pictures, and we connect regularly by phone with our two older kids.  Our youngest, as is as sometimes the case, is a little more challenging.  We have been known to just get in the car and drive the three hours to visit her since we hear so little from her.

I'm not sure if it is chicken and egg situation or not, but it is rare these days that families can stay close geographically. Is technology the cause or just something we have to have to fix the problem?  Of course this is coming from someone who moved to Canada to farm for sixteen years so maybe I'm part of the problem instead of part of the solution. I wrote about that in "Wanderlust of the soul."

We've actually tried using camera and video conferencing, but the ladies didn't like looking at themselves.  Email seems to be the most reliable thread holding together events and people, but when things get challenging a phone call is the next step, and sometimes only a visit will put things right.

The one thing I hope we have gotten with the digital age is a permanence to some of our times together.  We might not have those Sundays each week to get to know each other, but through digital magic we can remember things far more clearly than we might have. My mother is gone but both she and her stories live on not only in our memories but on a DVD that I made.   For Christmas 2005 I took the time to put together another DVD with snippets from videos I had taken of the kids since I first got a video camera in 1985.  I think we'll continue to have a lot of fun with it, and I might even do a volume two as I transfer the  video to a more robust medium.

We have all had photos for years, but often they were buried in boxes waiting for organization.  Today web based photo albums are a true treasure since they're a lot easier to catalog and organize.  I think they are one of the important glues holding families together today.  As they say a pictures is worth a thousand words and these days, putting a thousand pictures on the web isn't too hard.  I have a bunch at Flickr and Picasa Web albums and then lots of family ones still at .Mac.

Digital connections might not be as effective as those Sunday afternoons, but these days they're better than the alternative of just not communicating.  The kids are all so busy that another digital link would drive them crazy, but I think Backpack has the potential to be a great family communication tool, almost a wiki for families.

Still I miss those Sunday afternoons...