Ancestors
I My father
has already written the poems
about his ancestors and mine,
working class folks
who left Europe to populate America:
the many generations-back grandfather
who worked as a dowser for a coal company
moving from Wales to Pennsylvania;
the extended family that owned the inn
in Chancellorsville, destroyed
by the Civil War, the fractured family
streaming out into towns and farms
across the Midwest, losing and finding
each other again and again over the years.
He has visited the cousins,
Sat at their dinner tables asking and listing,
Collecting the stories of love and pain,
of hard work, alcohol, strength, illness,
displacement and belonging.
I read the poems, grateful
for the glimpses into the rivers
from which I come, but not sure
how to take it in.
II Mostly, we didn’t know these people growing up.
Papa had moved as far as he could from the trauma-fields
of his growing up in California; fled east
to Colgate, and then to the University of Chicago.
We grew up urban, mobile, radically progressive.
My connections to the lives
of his parents’ generation and their children
were few. I hold loving memories
of three visits to his Aunt Viola’s farm
in the southeast corner of Nebraska;
rolling fields with a few trees,
roads rolling straight across the landscape
for hundreds of miles, lazy rivers we drove past
but didn't visit, talk of crops and food
and family gatherings, a full house
sitting around the 100 year old dining room table
piled so high with food I couldn't see over the mashed potatoes,
gathering eggs and strawberries,
riding in the cart behind my second cousin’s pony,
12 kinds of jello salad in the church basement at Viola’s funeral,
all under the huge, changing sky.
It pulls at me, that landscape.
But it isn’t home.
And while the welcome was tangible every time we went,
there was no weaving of the lives we were living
with the life of that place.
We left behind our urban landscape
to be immersed for a few days at a time
in a world that was part of our roots,
but was not our own.
No one asked about what it was like in the city,
how we spent our days, what we talked about.
We listened and absorbed, reached for some sense
of this as ours to love and draw on,
but with no bridge between this life
and the one we were living.
We were loved there, but they never came to visit us.
Even my mother’s sister and her family,
who lived in small town New Jersey,
did not once visit us in Brooklyn.
We were invited in—to pick berries, go fishing, bake cookies,
join in the gender-separated holiday rituals,
men in front of the TV watching football,
women cooking and cleaning in the kitchen,
both rooms full of comradery and love—
but our lives were kept out of the room, strange,
and not very safe.
We were tangibly separate,
alone, the four of us, in the lives
our parents chose.
III Granny
My mother’s mother was the only bridge.
She would make the trip into Brooklyn,
sit in our living room, with its big windows
overlooking the park, do needlework or crochet
and listen to my parents’ stories about their work,
our stories about chorus concerts and musicals.
She helped my mother make materials for her classrooms,
made potholders and Christmas ornaments for their church bazaars
as well as her own. She welcomed us, whole,
just as we were, as she welcomed all people—
her friend, Mil Parsons, who worked with her
at the munitions factory during WWII and spent most of her life
living with her female “friend,”
the young black man pushing her shopping cart who she startled
into an astonished “are you talking to me” when she said “thank you, sir,”
my high school boyfriend who was raising the son conceived when he was sixteen,
my cousin who drank too much and rode motorcycles.
Whether we stayed near, or roamed far, she loved us all the same.
She loved me through my potty-mouthed teens, my absences,
my lack of thank you notes.
And she responded to my saying I had girlfriend who was a bookkeeper,
like she had been, by saying “when do I get to meet her?”
and embraced my step-daughters as grandchildren,
delighted to add to her growing roll.
She held all of us who extended out from her,
without judgement, loving us through all our successes and failures,
all our differences, never playing favorites, never taking sides,
just loving us.
Tasha Harmon, June 2018