Medicine Bag

D- had a project due today in his 9th-grade English class. The class has just finished reading a short story called "The Medicine Bag" and his project was to create his own. He had to collect 4 items that were representative of our family's history and/or ethnicity, write a page describing each item, put the items in a decorated "medicine bag", and present the items to his class.

You wouldn't believe the difficulty we had coming up with those four items. I mean it was really pathetic, almost shameful, that none of us could come up with anything interesting and reflective of our family's history.

To begin, neither my wife nor I come from families with strong ethnic ties so neither of us had anything ethnic to contribute. After much cogitation and discussion, we ended up giving D- the following:

1. A small history on the gunpowder explosions at DuPont's Hagley Mill in Wilmington, DE. My great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Fisher, and his son were killed in the 1863 explosion.
2. A sewing bag that came from my great aunt. She was a nationally-recognized weaver. The bag was made from cloth she wove. (And talk about handmade... my uncle once showed me a suit he owned. My aunt had made it herself from cloth she had woven.)
3. A rosary that belonged to my wife's great-grandmother. She came to the US in the late 1800s to escape Christian persecution in Lebanon.
4. A small doll that came from the Connecticut general store that my wife's great-grandfather opened after arriving in the US from Lebanon.

Boy do we come from some incredibly boring stock.
K-