Pieces of Her

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful...

~Marilynne Robinson

When it comes to my mother's side of the family, I have such a limited knowledge of our history. My great grandmother emigrated from Norway to the U.S. sometime in the late 1920's. She gave birth to my grandmother, put her up for adoption and then she more or less disappeared, carrying her story with her.  We were left with only a vague outline of our family tree: we came from a long line of Norwegian fishermen and our homestead is on a tiny island, which we shared with about ten other families. That's about as much as we know.

We've all been back to Norway to see the homestead, though. My grandmother went back and reconnected with our distant cousins, my mother lived in Norway for a time, and I've been inside our old house, which is the only place I've ever been where I felt that I completely fit. Of course, I was there during the summer and everything was warm and bright. I doubt I could handle the winters.

For the longest time we had only one photograph of my great grandmother, taken just before she left Norway for America. She was quite gorgeous, with dark red hair, blue eyes and very fair skin.

It was such an unexpected gift then, when about a month ago my mother accidentally discovered that she had several old slides of photographs my great grandmother had taken sometime in the 1940's when she went back to Norway. Mostly, she photographed the fishing boats on which our family worked. She doesn't appear in many of the photographs, and in the handful of pictures she is in, her face is blurred or obscured by dark shadows. But nonetheless, I love that we have found these pieces of her. And when I look at these photographs I am, in a way, seeing through my great grandmother's eyes:

Our old home

Still, my great grandmother is very much so a mystery. Maybe she will forever remain this way.  An enigma. Appearing and disappearing; a blurry ghost drifting through shadows. 

And always, always just out of reach.