My paternal grandmother at 97 years old is having to move to a nursing home. This makes my heart sad as I hoped that one day she would sit down in her rocker and simply take a nap and never wake up. My grandmother is a very independent women who at 16 married a man 25 years her senior, raised 5 children and was widowed at 48. She never remarried. I remember asking her once why and she said "Brendar Sue I just like being the boss of myself". My grandmother always surrounded herself with photos of her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even a few great-great children. Four of her five children joined the Armed Services and her children and grandchildren were scattered about the world. These photos sent by her children often the only visual connection for a period of years. I remember as a child coming to visit her between duty stations and looking at the photos of aunts, uncles and cousins. A sense of family forming through the color of eyes, or the shape of the nose or a shit-ass grin. Often she would pull out the older photos, those of our ancestors, her mother, father, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles many of these photos from the early 1900's, sepia images of women in white blouses and long skirts, the photos often taken in a somber pose, as if smiling was out of fashion in the portrait business of 1910. I found myself picking out doubles to my sisters and cousins, one with Sherri's nose, and my blue eyes, trying to identify the Cherokee great-great grandmother whose genes manifest themselves in the string of dark haired dark eyes McGee's amidst all of us blue eyed-blond Nixon's. My grandmother, my father, my sister Judi, my cousin Tony, my nephew Jason, and daughter Rachael all bare the mark of that gene. This sense of family of history so strong that often it felt cellular, a form of genetic magnetism, a pull between like genes. Even now I feel the call of family history so strong, as if I have a unfinished duty to these ancestors, as if perhaps I should be taking notes, writing it all down. My Aunnie (pronounced-A-knee) has been cleaning my grandmothers house, and recently sent me some photos that my grandmother had collected over the years. Mostly those of my sisters and I. I am in the the process of scanning them, this photo is myself, my sister Sherri, my sister Judi, my cousin Theresa (Sissy) and my aunt Debbie (my moms youngest sister) taken the summer we returned from Alaska (1974). The camper and truck in the background is the one we drove from Fairbanks to Ft. Worth, one that surfaces even now in my dreams. In my dreams I own this camper as an adult, but it is unchanged from 1974, and I am both adult and child in these dreams, as if somewhere in my psyche this camper represents a line between child and adult. In my dreams it still has harvest gold and brown plaid cushions, and we still drink hot chocolate out of brown plastic solo cup holders ( a modern version of a 70's classic), the main difference in the dreams and my memories, is that I am in flux, I am both my parents daughter, and my daughters mother. We are all there, Daddy, Momma, my husband, my daughter, my sisters and their families, all of our generations contained within the confines of a Coachmen camper. It is good magic.
