Cut From a Different Cloth: A Memorial Day Tribute to Grit, Grace, and the People Who Shaped Us

The Stories That Shaped Me

My grandfather was a WWII veteran who shared training stories at bedtime, mostly of perseverance, challenge, and camaraderie, but also of a different time: a childhood in the Great Depression, growing up in downtown Detroit. He joined the service very young and, before he left, trained himself by jogging his milk route through the city, all before the age of 20.

What They Carried, What They Left Behind

His mother, my great-grandmother, shared her own beautiful, wild stories with me: bathtub gin, having my grandpa way too early, working in a cookie factory, the ways she scraped and saved and somehow survived. Things I couldn't begin to conceptualize as a ten-year-old. She'd laugh, telling stories about her siblings, many of whom, I suspect, didn't survive childhood.

Recognizing the Fight

I grew up observant of the past. Because of them, I understood, on a much smaller scale, in a different century, what real hardship looked like. I know what it is to train alone. I know what it is to feel a higher calling regardless of your pocketbook or your surroundings. And I know what it means to be born with an unshakeable determination toward something greater.

So when I think about the soldiers, the families, the people on any type of path who have fought in some way to make the world a better, safer place, I see you. I recognize your fight.

 

My brother, my great-grandmother, and I sometime in the late 1980s

Cut From a Different Cloth

I like to think my grandpa and great-grandmother saw something in me, even when I was just a little girl. Maybe I was different. Maybe I had the ability to understand what they were trying to tell me.

Life is hard and wild, but you're cut from a different cloth, and we've made it this far. So can you.

Love Always with Grace,

Cassidy