Letting Go

Mom was the last person on the top of my family tree. Her much younger sister is the remaining matriarch. We were a small family to begin with. Everyone had between zero and two children, then we recently lost one of the younger generation. We’re a shrinking family with a long local heritage, local to my hometown of yesteryear.

My place of origin is south Alabama. It’s where the family farm has been generation after generation. It’s been my place to come back to for all my life, the constant that will be no more. My connection is breaking and I won’t be the sister who maintains a future with the land there.

It’s been a rough year for all of us. The big uniting family jokes of old are mostly meaningless to everyone I spend time with now. I do still have wonderful memories, they just don’t mean so much to people who weren’t there to help make them.

The photograph is my tribute to people who were with me in the before times. From left to right, That’s me with my son in my lap, then Mom with my daughter in her lap, then Mom’s mother, then her mother’s mother, 5 generations straight up a matrilineal line. I won’t have 5 generations of land anymore, but I will always carrry 5 generations of people in my heart, and I hope I’ll carry that 5 generations forward as well.

Mom was almost 30 years older than me when she died. Science papers and actuarials indicate that, chances are, the way I take care of myself, compared to how she did, I may have 40 years of life ahead of me. That’s enough time to give women like Margorie Stoneman Douglas a hard look and ask myself what it is that I think I can accomplish in act III.

I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, and I’ll be moving toward the future with increasing speed soon. Right now, I’m working on finishing a few things and making the best choices.

Until next time, have a glorious day, and we’ll see you on the trail!

The book this week is How Flowers Made our World by David George Haskell.