Welcome to The Heartland Album

My grandfather times 358 generations was born in the year 6827 BC. It would have been on September, 29^th if the Romans had been around then to name the months. I don't know what day of the week it was. GFx358 first opened his eyes in a cave in the upper elevations of a place that thousands of years later would be called the Swiss Alps of Europe.

It was a good cave. It had a nice high ceiling. The floor was flat and sloped gently toward the opening. A crack in the rock slab had caused the floor to buckle slightly and it had settled down to form a gentle channel leading from the sacred inner parts of the cave to the opening. When it rained water would seep in way back in the sacred inner parts of the cave and form a gentle stream along the channel emptying out of the mouth. The stream trickled down the mountain and eventually emptied into a lake now called Constance on the north of Switzerland and its border with Germany.

Times were prosperous for the clan. The weather was warming a bit. Game was plentiful as was the luscious fruit they picked from vines in their territory. They roamed a large plateau almost surrounded by their mountains to the south and others off to the northwest. In the distance were large fields of ice. Clan tradition said that at one place a scratch now shoulder high on a bolder had at one time been only about knee high above the ice.

GFx358 matured and became a good hunter.  One of his prized possessions was a horn from the first ibex he caught himself. When the weather turned bad they didn't worry about missing a day of hunting. The clan stored food in the cave. They cooked meat on a fire that always burned up-slope of the channel.

His bed, as were those of his family, was a pile of soft skins of animals he had helped trap. All kept their beds away from the little channel for they never knew when in the night the rain might start. It was somewhere about this time that the gene began to evolve in my family. If the dawn greeted GFx358 with thunder and lightning outside the mouth of the cave and if he heard a trickle of water in the little channel, he sighed comfortably and went back to sleep. It must be genetic. When I'm late for work I know exactly upon whom to place the blame!