A deep connection links Alice with her great-great-grandmother
by Deborah Eikle Thompson

As a young girl of four or five years of age, Alice visited the family farm with her mother and grandmother.

It had been the home where her maternal grandmother had grown up and where two great-uncles lived. The kitchen had, on its inside wall, a huge stone cooking fireplace with at least two warming ovens. Directly across from that had been a counter holding a sink and a hand pump for water. She remembered, too, the kitchen table with the attached meat grinder. She had watched in fascination as the meat poured out of the grinder and was stuffed into a casing.

Other snippets of memory were of being on the porch with her mother or grandmother as they shelled peas. Sometimes she'd been given a few of the peas to eat. They were like bits of candy in their sweetness. There were two large rooms upstairs; most likely shared bedrooms, for her grandmother had been one of nine children. The rest was a blank. Mother and grandmother both dead, she had no one to fill in her memory's gaps.

Here she was standing at the door of the house she barely remembered. How had life brought her back to this place?

University, then marriage

By the time she was in her late teens, the uncles sold the farm and each moved to his own place. She had gone to university; met her future husband there and had returned to live in the same county, if not the community, in which she had grown up.

Attending a summer drama course at the end of grade 12 resulted in phoning her parents to say she had decided to go to university, rather than train as a nurse.

Later, as their children had become more self-sufficient, Alice felt a restlessness that she had thought could spiritually be filled by her Christian faith. But the more she explored her religious roots, the more she became dissatisfied by religion.

Around the same time a friend asked her to attend a weekend workshop on an energy-based healing program. After the first session, Alice felt a solidness in purpose that began to change her. As she gradually became more and more comfortable with her healing gifts, an exploration of all things spiritual pushed her to seek more knowledge in this part of her life. She was the hermit crab trying on new shells.

A family gift

By then her mother had died of cancer, but her grandmother was still very much alive and willing to allow her eldest grandchild to "practice" on her. In fact, one day the elderly woman told Alice she remembered her own grandmother practicing some sort of healing. Alice eagerly pressed for more information, but that was the only tidbit forthcoming. It was still wonderful - to have a healing connection within her family.

Alice began making appointments with other healing practitioners. One of them was with a medical intuitive, who perceived more than physical information. The intuitive informed her client that she and her great-great-grandmother were twin souls. As best as Alice could make sense of it, that meant that they were of the same soul. Not sure what these words signified, she folded them up and tucked them away in her mind.

Visiting the family farm

Alice stood on the porch of the old house. It had been 50 years - would she recognize anything? Now here for a tour with her cousin, Naomi, they stepped inside and her eyes magnetized to the fireplace. Amazingly, it didn't seem to have shrunk in her adult view.

The rest of the kitchen had changed - the old hand pump existed only in memory photos. As the tour continued, the hostess and Naomi stopped to chat. Alice turned from where she was standing to look back into the kitchen. What had once been part of that room was filled with a wooden table surrounded by five chairs. Suddenly, as if a mist were lifting, Alice could see a rocking chair with a blind old lady sitting in it, swaying back and forth. Alice felt herself in the chair, knowing she was in twined in the past with her great-great-grandmother.

Naomi spoke and past snapped into present.

Alice breathed the certainty she had felt the energy of her twin soul as they had briefly rocked together.