Coda to the previous post.
My grandparents on my dad’s side and my great-grandparents on my mother’s side were all immigrants — from Russia and Lithuania respectivly, to New York.
(I knew both Sarah, my dad’s mother, and Mary, my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, so that history was real and personal. Mary, especially, was a vital part of my life, and my mother’s; she died at 91 when I was 18.)
What did they bring? A trunk? A suitcase? A pair of shoes? A cooking-pot? A quilt? A menorah?
Only the “habit of hands,” as my friend, poet Sharon H. Nelson, said: the skills and love of cooking, of making clothing?
Certainly none of this “stuff” crowding my house.
In some ways, this
is the mind-set I want.
