Histories Carried, Memories Remade

My son's face is settling into adulthood, a transformation that startles me daily, and I am thinking an awful lot about the past, about destiny, and about the histories we live in our bodies. I'm thinking about the obstinate set to his mouth that came from a grandmother he'll never know. A sturdy broad nose that came from a great grandfather he sees only in pictures.

I look at him and see my family, but I don't see me.

I look in the mirror and I see my grandmother’s face.

That ring of green that transmutes mud brown into hazel. The ruddy rounded cheeks, the gray nibbling at the temples, threatening to engulf the brunette hair. The drawing down at the corners of my mouth.

Is it disappointment or is it genetics?

She is a specter that haunts me. My father’s mother does not live much in my face, except for the feathering of lines around my lips. I don’t have her ears or her blue eyes. Or any of the curls that my father, my sister, my brothers have.

Or my mother’s mother. Or my mother’s father.

The only family I see in my face is in the droop of my mouth and the weariness around my eyes. I see my mother and my mother’s mother. The weak chin and wrinkled forehead. The mulish curve to my small lips. A stubbornness we cultivate like a mule.

We’ve been accused of kicking like one.

My grandmother worked in fields and then in gardens and cafeterias. She looked at the extensive backyard, and envisioned an orchard, a garden brimming with produce, and shelves stacked with canned goods for the winter. She fled west from a dust bowl and cultivated a cupboard of plenty.

I look at the garlic mustard, and crabgrass and, wild violets in my backyard, and think about work. I walk away and tell myself next year, "I’ll make it into something."

Would my grandmother see herself in me?

She crossed the country in an old truck, stopping at camps, standing in bread lines. I sleep in a soft bed with a sturdy window air conditioner and the farthest I walked was a mile to school on wide, clean streets through quiet middle class neighborhoods with rolling expanses of faded green, bearded by yellowed drought spots.

She wrote letters and dug victory gardens and hugged her brother goodbye before he boarded a ship for Japan.

I protested and had posters of Julia Butterfly-Hill and scribbled horns on her photos of Ronald Reagan.

She smiled and flirted with my grandfather. My grandfather was a hard man, with softness reserved for quiet moments. When the record was playing and she was crocheting and he was telling tall tales, or beating us all at poker.

He would hold her hand and whisper in her ear and she would blush, her already pink cheeks deepening into roses at full bloom.

I would slink back to my room, unsure of what to do with these elderly displays of sustained affection.

My grandmother and I are not the same, despite our drooping mouths and uncommitted hazel eyes. Our strengths run in different lines that genetics could never predict.

Would I find that same strength if we need to cross miles in an old Toyota Four Runner? Would I find that same ability to scrutinize the patch of green in the backyard and coax food from it?

She tried to bestow those skills upon me. Summers by her side peeling apples, slicing vegetables, standing on a stool in front of a steaming pot, moving cans, and listening with baited breaths for that sealing pop. Springs in the backyard, grafting branches and planting seeds and threading tomatoes around old metal cages. Coupon clipping and lessons on how to make a pension last. Finding satisfaction in the smallest things.

What is my grandmother except the memories I choose to tell?

Maybe it’s not disappointment in the corner of my mouth, but lessons hard learned and a story that I am still building.

Maybe she looked in the mirror and saw her mother and her mother’s mother and decided which stories to tell me. And maybe she saw herself in me when she sat me down with a bowl, a bucket of fresh picked green beans and, a song, while teaching me how to pare off the sharp edges.

When I look in the mirror, I see my grandmother’s face and know that my son sees that droop in the corner of my mouth. The muddy blend of green and brown in my eyes. That he knows them as me, and not as my grandmother.

I suspect this is the only way he'll truly know her, through her permutations that exist in me, a living testament. A witness to her softness and hardness alike. A promise always remade every time I tell a story or sing a song while snapping green beans.

I wonder what seeds I am planting in him that he will look in the mirror and see me.

(this is an attempt at creative nonfiction)