The way I walk I see my mother walking, the feet secure and firm upon the ground. The way I talk I hear my daughter talking, and hear my mother’s echo in the sound. The way she thought I find myself now thinking, the generations linking in a firm continuum of mind. The bridge of immortality I’m walking, the voice before me echoing behind. by Dorothy Hilliard Moffatt
The hostas are coming up; tiny shoots penetrating the soil and unfurling, the coils of their leaves break the earth in a luscious green array. The newness of each eruption symbolizes advent, a beginning. Winter’s end yields to a yawning genesis of pure potentiality; at its origin, the verdant metamorphosis of a living thing is simply breath-taking. And sensual. It is the caress of a gossamer breeze across the face; the warmth of sunshine on skin; the lyric birdsong of nest-makers in flight. It is, too, the delicate scent of a newborn’s hair inhaled, the soft curve of a cheek traced, the exquisite beauty of a child’s form realized. Senses awaken. Life, lying dormant, regenerates. From nothing, something. This is how it starts—the dawning of spring. The cycle of a human life.
My Grammy died a few months before Sydney, with a full head of copper hair, was born. My fiery Irish matriarch of a grandmother called me ‘love,’ drank Olympia beer from the little cans and quoted A.A. Milne. She was the first person I loved to die (“Don’t say ‘pass away’ when I’m gone, FOR GOD’S SAKE. I’ll be DEAD! Say, ‘She died.’”). I was bereft she wasn’t there to hold her great-granddaughter, but the significance of one life ending and another beginning wasn’t lost on me. Ancestral generations come full circle and begin again. I must fade so my children can blossom.
