Generations

Come summer, I begin to doubt what I am doing here. I don't know why the warm weather brings that on, but I begin to I feel as if I am just navel-gazing, who cares anyway, and I start to write less. I'm there now. What happens then is I start to post pictures, because this blog is still a place to put photographs I want to hold on to, which I imagine will be somehow safer with a home online. Our external hard drive at home is caput, we think it must have fallen over, and now it merely whines when we turn it on. Ironically, that hard drive was bought to serve as the backup for everything on our computers, and if we can't somehow retrieve its contents we will have lost years and years of images, documents, files. So I will post pictures and maybe write down the memories they evoke.

This photo above is of my cousins, five of the seven children born to my mother's oldest brother Percy. This was taken about a decade before I was born. My cousins are on the verandah of my grandmother's house at Little Kew Road in Jamaica. I am jealous sometimes that they knew my mother's mother, who is the stuff of legend in our family when the stories are told. She died when I was three. I have a single memory of her. She was ill and declining and we went to visit her. She was bedridden and as we walked into the room, I crouched against my mother, who coaxed me to go and hug and kiss my grandmother. I didn't budge. I just huddled under my mother, aware in that moment of her disappointment in me, her feeling of hurt that her child would not embrace her mother, whom she loved so dearly. I remember my grandmother, we called her Mama, just looked at me gently, a smile in her eyes and she said, "Let her be. She will come and kiss me when she is good and ready." I don't know that I ever did, I hope I did, because I remember feeling that her eyes were the kindest I had ever seen, and her love for me shone from them. She made me, a child already of aware of being awkward in my skin, feel completely whole and right. It is my only memory of Mama, but from the stories, I know she managed to make everyone feel exactly that way.

The second photo is another snapshot of cousins, two generations later. I've posted this picture before, it's one of my favorites, but today it seems to want to accompany the black and white image above. This picture was taken at Sea World in Orlando on a massive group vacation we took in the summer of 2001. Seven family units are represented here. My son is in the green cap and white tee, he is 9 years old. My daughter, wearing the blue striped top, is trying to get her little cousin to look at the camera. She is 7 years old. My niece in the khaki cap and blue tee shirt, is the oldest at 11 years. I feel so embraced by my family. If we choose our incarnations as some faith systems suggest, then clearly I chose this big rambling family so I could have a place to belong. And indeed, apart from my husband and children, it is among my cousins that I feel most at ease in my skin. We are all intentionally trying to foster that for our children as well.