Nora and Martha

Nora and Martha are my grandmothers. I have pictures of them as young women (which happens to be the way I picture them in Heaven) in my guest bedroom.

Sydney has been sleeping in the guest bedroom a lot lately as we sort out the whole how to get two young children to share a room business and she asked about the pictures yesterday.

I pointed to each one and gave her their first names and told her that they were my grandmothers. She repeated the names solemnly and carefully.

Nor-wuh

Marfa

And then she said, "I never knew their names."

As though she had been wondering for a very long time.

I think of my Aunt Kathi in this because Aunt Kathi is a perfect southern story keeper. She has all these little snippets and anecdotes that tell the story of a person's character which she imparts in random moments. I want to do the same for Sydney. To give her enough little stories about Nora and Martha that she has a sense of the women who came before her. She shares some of their genes. They shared their lives with the man and woman who raised me. My story has it's beginning in them and those before them and that makes them part of Sydney's story even though they passed out of this world long before Sydney was ever born.

I did explain briefly that Nora and Martha are Sydney's great-grandmothers. But it was more important to me that she know their real names. Because they aren't just ancestors. They are women in their own right.

Nora and Martha.

Nor-wuh and Marfa.