Considering Heritage

Family heritage is an elliptical thing. It comes to us in abbreviated shards of spidery handwriting--terse, and for all that (or because of that), more than half mystery. As its narrative approaches one's own particular page, its characters grow round, dynamic and multifaceted. Grandparents lift young faces to a black and white world, lips curved in the same smile we still see when they rouse themselves from armchair dozes. Aunts and uncles wait in chubby lines, infant eyes wide, captured in a kind of prolonged vulnerability. Watching them, we feel the tug of invisible threads. Sometimes we wish to snap free. Yet somehow we can't. The connection copies itself in every cell. For these are our stories--or rather, the stories in which we have been placed.