This weekend my husband and I sifted through fifteen years of papers and pictures we had stashed in boxes in our garage. We found college essays, old emails we’d sent to each other, and baby pictures of us that our parents had handed over years ago.
In among the pictures, I found one that captured five generations of the women in my family.
I remembered this picture. It used to make me laugh when I was a girl, because the older the generation, the shorter the woman. I was around eleven or twelve in the picture; I was the tallest female standing.
What I noticed this time, however, was not only the stair step quality about that picture; I noticed the women—their strength, their poise, their certainty that life was theirs for the taking.
There was white-haired Memama, who lost her husband young, who lived, alone, in the house he built her until the day she fell on its sidewalk and died during hip surgery, who slept with a pistol under her pillow, just in case. She was legendary in our family. She lived until she was one hundred years and two weeks old.
There was her daughter, my Nana, who had false teeth and a pacemaker, who wouldn’t go anywhere without her orange-tinted lipstick, who made the best chicken and dumplings in the south. She lost a son early, in a car accident, practically raised his kids, lost her husband in his garden, and drove way too fast, as though daring life to take her, too. She would have loved to know the Astros won the World Series this year. She lived until she was ninety.
There was her daughter, my Memaw, who had a fiery temper (especially on roadways), loved the color purple, and stayed up late snacking on Riesen caramels, potato chips, and Werther’s original hard candies. She was opinionated (just ask my Uncle John), bitter at the edges, and one of the most generous people I’ve ever known. She lived without her husband for more than thirty years, in a house all by herself, until she died at seventy-four.
And there is my mom, who spent years raising her three kids as a single mom before my stepdad came along. She made hard choices, worked more than one job, and sacrificed her dream of becoming an anthropologist to become a school librarian (which I think she liked better anyway). Today she runs the Jackson County library I grew up visiting and stocks every book I write.
Sometimes I forget this long line of strong women who stand behind me. I forget that they are in my bones, in my veins, in my mind and heart. I forget that their strength is also my strength, that the greatness that lived in them is also the greatness living in me.
Looking at this picture makes me wish that the three women in it who are no longer living were here—to walk, unafraid, out the doors of her old house on the wrong side of the tracks; to yell raucously for the Astros and remind us that she’d been rooting for the right team all along; to laugh until the sound shakes itself out. To meet my sons, to show them what strong women look like, to share a past that is wholly unimaginable to children today.
But the ones who remain—my mother, my aunt, my sister, and me—will tell their stories, live in their strength, and carry on.
We will remember.
