Wednesday 6 May 2009

More of the past



Here is a woman I didn't know. She was my great grandmother and I bear her name. My mother thinks we look alike. I can't judge. There seem to be many mysteries in the communal past of our family, are they actually secrets, or is it just that we can never know everything? I am sometimes shocked by words that come out of my mouth. Shocked because they are not my words, they are my mother's. I, like a parrot, occasionally find myself speaking phrases, commands, opinions that are not my own. How many of these came from her mother, and her mother's mother? Are there family phrases and opinions that still remain which came from the woman in this photo? Words distilled down the years gaining strength or becoming weaker in an intergenerational game of chinese whispers.

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