#Resilience

**The Only Biography She'll Ever Have** If you searched her name right now, you would find nothing. No Wikipedia page. No obituary in a real newspaper. No entry in any book, in any language, anywhere in the world. She was my grandmother. For thirty-eight years, she ran a small tailor shop on the corner of a street that doesn't even have the same name anymore. She never once advertised. People just knew her. If your zipper broke the morning of a job interview, you went to her. If a hem needed fixing before a wedding, you went to her. She kept a drawer full of buttons sorted by color, not by size, because she said "people remember color before they remember anything else." She raised three children mostly alone, after my grandfather left for work in another province and simply never made it back. She never once told us she was angry about it. She told us, instead, about the year the shop flooded and she saved the sewing machine before she saved the cash box, "because the machine feeds us, the money just sits there." None of this will ever be verified by a historian. There's no footage of her. No interview. If you type her full name into a search engine, you'll get results for someone else entirely -- a singer, apparently, in another country, who happens to share her name. And yet. I know exactly how she counted change without looking at it. I know she hummed the same three notes of an old song whenever she was concentrating. I know she cried exactly once in front of me, the day my mother told her she was moving the family overseas, and that she apologized for crying, as if it were rude. History has no interest in any of this. But I do. My children will, too, someday, if I write it down before I forget the exact three notes she used to hum. That's the whole idea behind Homeriah, distilled into one person: a woman with no encyclopedia entry, no public record, no footprint anywhere outside the people who loved her -- and an entire life's worth of meaning anyway. Wikipedia will never write her biography. So we did. It's just three paragraphs long, and it's the only one that will ever exist. And somehow, that makes it worth more, not less. The Question: Who is the "her" or "him" in your family -- the person history will never write about, whose whole biography exists only because you're willing to write it? One ordinary life. Preserved forever.

Susan Harrison

Mark and I have had a handful of genuinely rough stretches over the years -- a supplier price hike in 2008 that had us doing the math at the kitchen table more nights than I'd like to admit, the flood in 2014, plenty of long days where neither of us had much energy left for conversation by closing time. But we always came back around to each other, usually over coffee before the store opened, just the two of us going over the day ahead. This photo from the 2008 harvest festival is from right in the middle of that price-hike stretch -- we look a little worn out, honestly, but we're standing close, and I remember that day as one where we felt like we were in it together, not just next to each other.