Day 208

Light and thistle seeds. 

Delicate fairy creatures, these thistle seeds.  Wafting away, they fly until they fetch up against something, and then begins the long long wait, through autumn, the cold snows of winter, until spring, when a few of them will have discovered the perfect place for a new thistle plant, and, having all the purple and green and white carefully stored inside the seed's memory, will proceed once again with the cell-dividing and metamorphosis into a tall strong plant which attracts insects, and makes beauty with light.

Watching these children of mine, I see the DNA memory they have stored inside them, us three women with the feet and ankles of my mother, their Granny Joan, and handed down to her from the Hewitson side - my great aunt Phyllis with the same ankles.  And my female cousins, they both laugh like their mother, Nora, my mother's sister, who received the genes for that particular laugh, in her turn, from my grandmother Gracie, my little granny who gave so many of us her artistic genes, the ability to look at something and draw it perfectly, the capacity for beauty which stopped Nick in his tracks one spring day at Dalrymple School, where three trees stood in all their white spring blossom.  (Nick has always been hyper-aware of beauty, e.g. when he was nearly three he came into the corner shop with me where, unfortunately, all the porn magazines were displayed behind the glass at his eye level.  He fell utterly in love with one large-breasted cover-girl,  looked up at me with wonder in his eyes as he asked if he could have that particular "book" for his birthday.)

Matthew rubs his feet together when sitting just like my dad used to, and both boys sleep positioned like Tim in bed.  And where did Matthew's huge round eyes come from?  Nick's long bony fingers, the brown eyes of Jess, the only child without blue eyes?  (When the girls were little, I once told Emma that she had eyes like the sky, sunny-sky-blue eyes, and Jess eagerly asked me, "Well, what are my eyes like Mom?" To which I replied, "Your eyes are like mountain-pools, the water that's come down from the top of the mountain."  Years later I discovered that she thought I meant her eyes were like mud-pools!)

I have Swedish, Scottish, British and South African blood.  We are all made up of such mixtures, the darknesses, the lights, the talents, the vices of our ancestors running through our veins.  And it is fascinating to see little bits of things, little shards here and there, in subsequent generations.  Some ancestors are lost now that we are the oldest generation of the family, like Auntie Birdie, whose name was Berenice, and who was beloved of my grandmother, but I have no idea where she fits in in the family tree.  And old Auntie Bill, called Wilhelmina, who helped raise my orphaned grandfather, I think.  They were seen infrequently and so are largely forgotten by my childhood self.

Here are my two girls reading something intently together on the couch, Jess not sitting in the regular way, which is her usual manner, reading over the shoulder of her older sister Emma, their hair almost blending together, their heads so close.