black and white fingerprints...

son flips book-pages and i see my mother and her dog-eared copy of Anna Karenina and the hours at kitchen table teaching children and her, even now, reading in spite of tumor



and as moon-yellow spills across the curved backs of fields and the combines whirr and the chaff falls like yarn




trent and i finger the photo albums, the black and whites of men and women now singing heaven's chorus who once were, who now make up our baby's dna, and we touch the pictures near-reverent,





the opa who made something from nothing in his tool shed, whose pet was a goat, who died in the bush





my nanny who painted europe on canvas, water-color-fine, whose husband hangs her paintings tender long after she left, door swinging wide






my rose-papered grandma who planted trees and recycled and canned and, when she stopped to rest, fell asleep







my father, the pastor, whose only fault is he serves too hard




trent's father, the farmer, who walks with the deer

his wife, mother of many whose arms are always holding









i want my boy to know this. to know from whom he comes. to know the black and white prints, the grey-haired-legacy, the God-chain from adam descent... so he might think on them and live up and beyond them and know















his being here is

something

golden.



linking also with One Shot Wednesday.