This time of year is when many cultures celebrate holidays such as Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, or Samhain. The last harvest has been gathered. The days grow dark and the nights grow long. It is the earth’s time to rest in darkness. This is a time of trust: we believe that the light will come again. We trust that death is part of life, just another turn of the wheel. This is the time to remember the past by telling, reading, or writing the stories of our ancestors. I usually throw a party for family and friends around this time. The party has four main features, all of which honor the dark, the past, and the dead. The first thing we do is go on a mushroom walk. We ramble through a wooded place and keep our eyes on the ground. At first we see few, if any, mushrooms, because they are shy creatures. Then suddenly we’ll spot them, showing up in an amazing variety of shapes and colors, growing under fallen leaves and on rotten logs, bringing color and life to death. When we see t...

With St. Patrick’s Day just days away, Emancipation Day coming up on April 16, and Cinco de Mayo on May 5, I was thinking about various observances that can add richness to our writing, inspire a story (or stories), and open doors to our own pasts. What begins as research for a book may end up a journey into our ancestral roots—or vice versa. Great-great-grandfather John Unversaw thwarted attack on Union munitions depot during Civil War. In the late 1990s, I wrote a family genealogy after interviewing elderly relatives, reading old wills and documents, and searching a newspaper morgue in an Indiana town. Decades ago, obituaries offered a wealth of information about the deceased, and I learned a lot from them that no one had ever told me. Old newspaper photos and pictures long stored in relatives’ attics added faces to the accounts. The book grew to over 80 pages. As a small child, George Clements, M.D., came to the U.S. from Ireland with his mother, my great-grandmoth...