October is the month of the Ancestors.
We confine them to a few days at the end of the month, but really, October belongs to them in its entirety.
I've been haunted for the last several weeks by grief. Loss, which can never be assuaged, because, well, like the children of Rachel, they are not.
Memories of how things were, for good and for ill, and now there is no more.
So I have cleaned and re-arranged my low table altar with pictures - and thank God for pictures. Pictures of my mother, my two grandmothers, and my great grandmother Florence. The grandfathers will be added soon. Also there, a fine horse, a white horse who I miss most purely and grieve for most deeply.
There are other ancestors I know nothing about. Christina Lutz Barthell, holding her rosary. My dad said his dad told him "She was Jewish, but don't tell." A host of others, faces frozen in pose, nameless, their stories held in secret.
They all came here, to America.
From the 1600's onward, many of my ancestors made their way to this New World, leaving boundary wars, destruction, starvation, leaving persecution, leaving hopelessness, and also families, languages, customs, ancestral lands, and governments. Tragically, they mostly were unable to identify with the indigenous people of the land here, but I am sure that my lineage must include some of the indigenous of this land.
I can't identify much more than broad brush strokes in my lineage; From the pictures and the correspondence, Western Europe. England, Alsace Lorraine. Probably Ireland, maybe Denmark, perhaps France; Belgium? Luxumburg? Switzerland? And America, populated before any of the others came from the Old World. But I can't tell.
When trying to decipher what land I belong to, it is apparent that it is this Turtle Island; Its colors, trees, hills, mountains, grasslands and coastlines. The Old World calls me sometimes, I long for its beauty of land and timelessness of stone; but I would be alien there. The language is gone. The culture is not familiar. It's mythic to me.
Half dog, half wolf, then. Here I was born, here raised, and half wild at that, at any rate, as wild as a modern Child could be, filled with myth and memory, and migration.
The candles are lit on the low table altar, illuminating the photos and the memories, and the deep deep feelings. I have looked long into those other women's eyes, at their hope, and resignation, their beauty, their happiness, their uncertainty, their fierceness; experiencing dangers, persecutions, disease, abandonment, loss. Some of them rose above and maintained themselves creatively, and others abandoned creativity for other things like security, and who knows the costs these ancestors endured. It helps me to look at their faces. We all bear the stigma and the glory of being female.
I am certain of only my mother, and my grandmothers. That's enough. Beyond that, although there are books and genealogies, and some photos, I cannot fathom it.
Here is this body: a continent filled with a river of blood that flows back to the Beginning, the blood of a long march of life, and it flows without my control or my will even. It carries me along like a leaf on a stream.
Here is the myth: There is always a hunger for home, that covers this whole wide earth, and we are always on the way there.
