My family celebrates Christmas, and this year I received a special gift from my mother-in-law: a piece of polished amber that had belonged to her mother-in-law, my husband’s grandmother. She had brought it to America with her from Poland, and when she died my mother-in-law inherited it.
The circumstances of her arrival from Poland bear commenting on. The family was poor and a decision had been taken to send my husband’s grandmother, then thirteen, to live with extended family in Philadelphia (one gathers that the reason was less her potential to prosper in the new world and more the fact of thus having one less mouth to feed, though the specifics remain murky). So there was a family trip to a seaport, at which time –– and not before — the thirteen-year-old was told that she was in fact getting on the ship in the harbor and leaving everything and everyone she had known … forever.
I try to imagine that girl, the fear, the rebellion, the horror that she must have experienced upon hearing that news. And then there was this piece of amber. Had she already been carrying it around in her pocket? Or was it pressed upon her by anxious parents as a good-luck talisman? Either way, it was one of very few articles she was able to bring with her from “home,” and even though she lived in the United States for another seventy years, I cannot help but imagine her touching that amber and touching the memory, the last time she saw her parents, the last time she saw her homeland.
And now it is mine.
I keep touching it, too: it draws one in, like a Arab worry-stone, like my own rosary beads: a physical grounding in something that transcends physicality. I feel connected to that girl on that long-ago dock, I feel the amber in her pocket, her fingers wearing it down, and my own fingers slide over it with wonder.
It reminds me of the millions of stories we all have, the stories of our forebears, the stories that help to make us who we are. And as the new year begins, it’s not a bad thing to look back on, to rehearse the oral histories that have come down to us, to remind ourselves of who we are. Stepping into the future through the past, and possibly — just possibly — learning a thing or two along the way.
And a very, very happy 2008 to all!
– Jeannette Cézanne
http://www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: Opening the heart, Difficulty, Overcoming difficulty, Overcoming obstacles — jcezanne
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