Rachel Brougham: House on fire

My family celebrated every major holiday — all 20 some of us —in a small country kitchen on a corn farm in western Michigan. We were so squeezed that if you were lucky enough to grab a seat, you didn’t get up or you’d be one of the people forced to stand and eat.

The gathering was the ultimate exercise in family hierarchy.

“Turn it up, I can’t hear the game.”

“Move over!”

“Mom! No, I mean my mom!”

“WHO TOOK THE LAST SLICE OF CHERRY PIE?”

“Get up, I’m older than you.”

I grew up in that kitchen. I knew I was loved in that kitchen. And I thought the way it was was the way it would always be.

But that was before Donald Trump. As the country argues over his numerous court cases and his stranglehold on the Republican party, I know that my family and many others are already victims of Trump himself. For many of us, he’s thrown gasoline on fires we didn’t even know our own families had smoldering.

My Grandma and Grandpa were married in 1945 after Grandpa came back from the war. They lived in a one-bedroom farmhouse where they grew corn and hay, and had cows which Grandpa milked each morning before going to his full-time job at an upholstery company. They went to church every Sunday.

They raised five children, four boys and my mother, the second oldest and only girl. My mother was the outlier of the family, the only one who would go off to college and not return to the rural farming town where she grew up. I was the only grandchild who didn’t grow up a stone’s throw from Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and the only of nine grandchildren who didn’t have a sibling. I was the only one who didn’t grow up going to church every Sunday, although we still went plenty.

But I loved Grandma and Grandpa’s house. And what better place to host 20-plus family members for a holiday meal than that small farmhouse. We’d pile in the dining-living room combo, no larger than a one-car garage. Plastic cups of half-drank soda sat between all the displayed photos of grand- and later great-grandchildren. One time I sat on a rogue fork someone dropped on the floor that left a small scar on my bottom. Someone always clogged the one toilet in the house. My socks would get wet from the slush family members carried in on their winter boots. Finding your pair of shoes at the end of the day was the ultimate match game.

My four uncles all married women whose first name started with the letter S, two of them Sandys. When my husband first arrived on the scene, a cousin advised him to just yell out an S-name and hope for the best.

After grandpa thanked God for the food, asked him to bless it to our bodies and to watch over us all, it was time to eat.

The dining table was loaded with the regular cast of characters from any Midwest family gathering. There was canned corn masquerading as a vegetable, white rolls, mashed potatoes — both homemade and instant because grandma wanted to please a loud minority — and a lemon Jell-O-shredded carrot-pineapple-cream cheese-marshmallow concoction known as salad. Those humble sides would be served alongside giant slices of ham, which few of us grandkids liked, but were told by our mothers, “Ham feeds a lot of people. Deal with it.”

The chaos was undeniable, the love was not. I believed my family was the model for what all families should be. What I did not believe is that someday, a person none of us have ever or will ever meet would come between us.

I learned a lot about my family during the 2016 presidential election, such as our different feelings on Christian nationalism, the LGBTQ community and our interpretations of the Second Amendment. The results of the 2020 election are still being debated by a few relatives on social media. It’s as if a few family members watched a totally different version of the Jan. 6 insurrection than others. Did I mention I have a cousin who insists the George Floyd murder, which happened only a mile from my house, was a false flag? We haven’t spoken in more than two years.

As a former newspaper editor, I struggle with how so many Americans have trouble differentiating fact from opinion and would rather believe conspiracy than the truth. To be honest, it not only worries me, I’m terrified.

My grandpa died in 2003. Grandma followed in 2011.

Some family members made the difficult decision to burn Grandma and Grandpa’s house down in 2021. A mixture of time and decay had taken its toll and it was going to cost far more than it was worth to make the necessary repairs. The local fire department used it as a training exercise.

Even when you expect it, nothing prepares you to see a place you once loved destroyed. When I saw the photos of that small farmhouse in flames, it felt as if everything it stood for was being destroyed right along with it.

The house may have burned to the ground but the flames still rage within my family. The kitchen where I felt so loved is no longer there and the people who once made me feel so loved now feel like strangers.

Time and distance are two factors that can take a toll on families, but that’s not the only reason my family feels so distant to me today. I often ask myself “what happened” but I know what happened. Donald Trump happened.

We should all be able to have various opinions on policy — what should happen at the border, how we should handle international conflicts, the best way to fix the economy — and set those differences aside for the sake of our relationships. But this isn’t a story about differences in policy. For me and many others, these fractures in our family relationships are about morals, values and our trust in one another. And they are fractures brought to the surface by Trump.

I mourned my grandparents when they died. Now I’m clinging to the memories of what once was in that tiny, crowded farmhouse full of many of my favorite memories. I’m mourning the loss of my family as I knew it, before Trump came raging into our lives and set a fire I’m not sure we’ll be able to extinguish.

— Rachel Brougham is the former assistant editor of the Petoskey News-Review. You can email her at racheldbrougham@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Rachel Brougham: House on fire