On Sunday, my mom and uncle started telling family stories.The good, the bad, the heinously ugly. They spent hours telling me about their childhood. I absolutely love hearing these, because this is where I come from. These are my people.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I don’t know about that. In the picture above, my grandma and her husband and my dad are all looking crazy at my uncle. My other uncle is looking away. Why? Nobody remembers. You can look and look at this picture, but it tells you very little about who these people really were.

That’s why I love the family stories- all of them. Stories of dog funerals that still traumatize my uncle. Stories of my grandfather backing 3 miles down a mountain road because my uncle kicked my mom’s shoe out the window. Stories of my uncle John riding around in a trailer in a tornado.

"Write all this down," said my uncle. "Your kids will appreciate it later." Oh, I will. I want my kids to really know the people in all these pictures.