My family has lived in Kansas for a long time. Not so long ago that the Abyssal Plain was submerged beneath an inland sea full of dinosaurs, but sometimes it seems like that. My Swedish (on my father's mother's side) and Cherokee (on my mother's mother's side) were the most recent arrivals in the late 1800s. Both grandfathers derived from German stock, some of the first settlers to the Great Plains. On my father's father's side, we have ancestors who fought with John Brown to keep Kansas a Free State in the years leading up to the Civil War, when the Territory was known as Bleeding Kansas. Nowadays, it mainly seems like we fight with each other - climate change, politics, economy, anything but religion. About that, now, we mostly agree.
As my last grandparent, my father's father, spends his final days in a hospice bed, I think a lot about ancestors. This sticker, teeming with Kansas pride (another thing we all agree on), reminds me that family never really goes away, even when bones become sediment, blood feeds aquifers, and hair grows tallgrass prairies.
That's what it is to be a part of something: family that sticks together despite conflicts, bodies that doggedly go back into the same ground where ancestors were born and buried, right next to the toothy dinosaurs from even further back in time. 
Now I need to settle on the right place to stick this sticker, once and for all.

– Sara Rich

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more