Indianola, Onward
My three children are sixth-generation Texans, and if you had told me, a roller-skating suburban New York girl, that I would ever type that sentence, I would have said you were insane. But here I am, married for 19 years to a man who says “pin” for “pen” and has three pairs of cowboy boots and a Stetson. The first time my husband-to-be visited my mom’s place in Rye, New York, he came downstairs in jeans and dress shoes, and she pulled me aside. “I told all my friends he was a Texan,” she whispered. “Doesn’t he have any boots?”
Amused, my fiancé—Timothy “Tip” Meckel—went upstairs and changed his footwear. All evening, my mother’s friends pointed at his feet and giggled. Imagine Amanda marrying a Texan! And not just a Texan but a scientist—none of us had ever met a geologist before. When my family came to our wedding, they were utterly lost trying to follow my father-in-law’s directions, which instructed guests to “turn right at the cretaceous outcrop.”
DNA tests can now tell you exactly where you came from and which mysterious biological relatives exist for you to cyber-stalk and maybe even contact. My childhood wasn’t easy, though, and as I raise my Texan children in Austin, I’m not as entranced by pinpointing where I came from biologically as I am in understanding where, instead, I belong.
I am the daughter-in-law of German settlers who arrived in Indianola, now underwater but once an immigration hub and later a thriving port city. To delve into the family I was lucky enough to marry into, I decided to begin in Indianola and follow the route my husband’s ancestors had traveled to reach the Hill Country, specifically Boerne and New Braunfels. It would take me a few days of driving slowly and eating lunches at historical markers, but it took the
