Lucky

My dad, ever the geneaologist, sent me a photo of my fourth great-grandmother, Sarah Luck. She is seated on the front left, next to her husband, Henry. The others in the photo, I think, are her siblings. These folks, so far as I know, spoke mostly the Pennsylvania German dialect known as "Pennsylvania Dutch."

Kinship is an odd thing-- these days, especially, as we become more and more rootless. I alternately question and embrace my ancestors' impingement on my identity.

Much as I like my modernity, I sometimes find myself homesick for the givenness of a received cultural identity. True, we can never not have this, no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise. However, we moderns live in rebellion (in one form or another) against the receptivity of our forebears.

The poet Charles Wright says:

How like the past the clouds are,
Building and disappearing along the horizon,
Inflecting the mountains,
laying their shadows under our feet

For us to cross over on.
Out of their insides fire falls, ice falls,
What we remember that still remembers us, earth and air fall.

Neither, however, can resurrect us or redeem us,
Moving, as both must, ever away toward opposite corners.
Neither has been where we're going,
bereft of an attitude.

(from "Apologia Pro Vita Sua" in Negative Blue, p. 73).
These are apt words to warn us of sentimentality's dangers as we regard "the past" or "nature."