I never met my grandma Starr – she died before I was born, but I’ve been getting to know her lately through scanning photos of her and reading about her life in bits and peices. And the photos just take my breath away.
I can’t tell you how much I adore getting to know these people, MY people even though it’s posthumously.
“We know so little of our connection, anyway, as people marry and move on and you don’t never hear from them again. It’s like in all our blood ties of cousins and aunts and uncles and ancestors and descendants we don’t see but those near us. Why children, your children will have children I will never know, and their children’s children will never have heard of me. No use to deny it. Looking backwards I don’t know more than my Grandmammy and Granddaddy on either side, and all the rest is just a name here, a fact there, a rumor. All the people stretching back two or three generations to Pennsylvania and Wales, and back to Adam, are just lost in the fog and dust. We are isolated in the little clearing of now and all the rest is tangled woods and thickets nobody much remembers. I always said it’s how you enjoy that little opening in the wilderness that counts. That’s all you have a chance to do. That’s why I’m telling you this story.”
-Robert Morgan, The Hinterlands
by jefra starr linn
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