
I Want to Know the Leaves
My great-grandmother deserves better than a name on a family tree. I want to understand the people between the names and dates, and leave something of my own story behind.
Filed under
Writing and visual commentary connected to this thread.
15 entries

My great-grandmother deserves better than a name on a family tree. I want to understand the people between the names and dates, and leave something of my own story behind.

Two voting photographs, six years apart, open a family history of Clifton, Lakeside Village, and the rooms where we learned to belong.

A zebra-patterned unicorn, a grandmother, and an imaginary realm: what making art with HIM means to me.

Student protests in France, my own marches in 1998, and the first full printed draft of an illustrated memoir.

A flattering tribute leaves difficult questions about arrival dates, slavery, and what a family history owes its subjects.

A presidential sex scandal, a mountain commune, spectacularly wrong shoes, and the family visit that brought two worlds to the same dinner table.

A rainy return to Clifton, Texas: childhood field trips, family roots, Olaf’s, and the people keeping a town’s cultural life going.

A daughter comes home from boarding school, Sunday gets sentimental, and Texas reappears along the highway with billboards, server farms and grid anxiety.

An errand with my mother became a journey through the Hill County landscape that keeps giving our family pieces of itself.

Politicians work for us. Texas is not a franchise model. And sometimes one sharp woman is enough to prove you are not alone.

Three generations arrived. Two drove away.

A number crosses generations and refuses to behave like a coincidence.

A restored portrait, a DNA cluster and the patient labor between them.

Seventeen miles to school is not atmosphere. It is the architecture of a childhood.

Two hundred fifty years later, freedom remains both inheritance and unfinished work.