What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

By John Hausdoerffer

As we face an ever-more-fragmented world, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? demands a return to the force of lineage—to spiritual, social, and ecological connections across time. It sparks a myriad of ageless-yet-urgent questions: How will I be remembered? What traditions do I want to continue? What cycles do I want to break? What new systems do I want to initiate for those yet-to-be-born? How do we endure? Published in association with the Center for Humans and Nature and interweaving essays, interviews, and poetry, this book brings together a thoughtful community of Indigenous and other voices—including Linda Hogan, Wendell Berry, Winona LaDuke, Vandana Shiva, Robin Kimmerer, and Wes Jackson—to explore what we want to give to our descendants. It is an offering to teachers who have come before and to those who will follow, a tool for healing our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with our most powerful ancestors—the lands and waters that give and sustain all life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226777573

Book preview

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

Edited by John Hausdoerffer, Brooke Parry Hecht, Melissa K. Nelson, and Katherine Kassouf Cummings

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77726-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77743-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77757-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226777573.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hausdoerffer, John, editor. | Hecht, Brooke Parry, editor. | Nelson, Melissa K., editor. | Cummings, Katherine Kassouf, editor.

Title: What kind of ancestor do you want to be? / edited by John Hausdoerffer, Brooke Parry Hecht, Melissa K. Nelson, and Katherine Kassouf Cummings.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020043082 | ISBN 9780226777269 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226777436 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226777573 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Traditional ecological knowledge. | Indians of North America—Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC GN476.7 .W438 2021 | DDC 970.004/97—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043082

For flow and clarity, some interviews have been edited.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

POEM: Unsigned Letter to a Human in the 21st Century, Jamaal May

I. Embedded

Our ancestral responsibility is deeply rooted in a multigenerational relationship to place.

A. POEM: Great Granddaddy, Taiyon Coleman

B. ESSAYS:

I. Ancestor of Fire, Aaron A. Abeyta

II. Grounded, Aubrey Streit Krug

III. My Home / It’s Called the Darkest Wild, Sean Prentiss

C. INTERVIEW: Wendell Berry, Leah Bayens

D. POEM: To the Children of the 21st Century, Frances H. Kakugawa

II. Reckoning

Reckoning with ancestors causing and ancestors enduring historical trauma.

A. POEM: Forgiveness?, Shannon Gibney

B. ESSAYS:

I. Sister’s Stories, Eryn Wise

II. Of Land and Legacy, Lindsey Lunsford

III. Cheddar Man, Brooke Williams

IV. Formidable, Kathleen Dean Moore

C. INTERVIEW: Caleen Sisk, Brooke Parry Hecht and Christopher (Toby) McLeod

D. POEM: Promises, Promises, Frances H. Kakugawa

III. Healing

Enhancing some ancestral cycles while breaking others.

A. POEM: To Future Kin, Brian Calvert

B. ESSAYS:

I. Moving with the Rhythm of Life, Katherine Kassouf Cummings

II. (A Korowai) For When You Are Lost, Manea Sweeney

III. To Hope of Becoming Ancestors, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Julianne Lutz Warren

C. INTERVIEW: Camille T. Dungy and Crystal Williams

D. POEM: Yes I Will, Frances H. Kakugawa

IV. Interwoven

Our descendants will know the kind of ancestor we are by reading the lands and waters where we lived.

A. POEM: Alive in This Century, Kristi Leora Gansworth

B. ESSAYS:

I. What Is Your Rice?, John Hausdoerffer

II. Restoring Indigenous Mindfulness within the Commons of Human Consciousness, Jack Loeffler

III. Reading Records with Estella Leopold, Curt Meine

IV. How to Be Better Ancestors, Winona LaDuke

C. INTERVIEW: Wes Jackson, John Hausdoerffer and Julianne Lutz Warren

D. POEM: Omoiyare, Frances H. Kakugawa

V. Earthly

Other-than-human beings are our ancestors, too.

A. POEM: LEAF, Elizabeth Carothers Herron

B. ESSAYS:

I. The City Bleeds Out (Reflections on Lake Michigan), Gavin Van Horn

II. I Want the Earth to Know Me as a Friend, Enrique Salmón

III. The Apple Tree, Peter Forbes

IV. Humus, Catriona Sandilands

V. Building Good Soil, Robin Wall Kimmerer

C. INTERVIEW: Vandana Shiva, John Hausdoerffer

D. POEM: Your Inheritance, Frances H. Kakugawa

VI. Seventh Fire

A. POEM: Time Traveler, Lyla June Johnston

B. ESSAYS:

I. Seeds, Native Youth Guardians of the Waters 2017 Participants and Nicola Wagenberg

II. Onëö’ (Word for Corn in Seneca), Kaylena Bray

III. Landing, Oscar Guttierez

IV. Regenerative, Melissa K. Nelson

V. Nourishing, Rowen White

VI. Light, Rachel Wolfgramm and Chellie Spiller

C. INTERVIEW: Ilarion Merculieff, Brooke Parry Hecht

D. POEM: Lost in the Milky Way, Linda Hogan

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Contributors

Index

Introduction

Morning on the coast brought the kind of weather one expects from spring at the ocean’s edge. Northwest of San Francisco, heavy fog lifted slowly, revealing verdant hills upon which dairy cows and tule elk were feasting. The dewy chill settled around us as we hastened to the ceremony. As we approached, we could smell burning sage. We gathered in a circle and listened as Coast Miwok leader Sky Road Webb offered his gratitude to the ancestors who shaped his coastal homeland here on the land taken and called California. Cracking open an oyster shell, he laid the burning sage inside, asking each of us to hold the shell so we could invite our own ancestors into the circle. Doing so, we smudged ourselves with the burning sage. The shell, the sage, the community, and Webb all merged bringing together sea, land, sky, people, past, present, and future to reflect on the question that gathered us that day, beginning our collaboration as coeditors: What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

One of our coeditors first heard this question while interviewing Winona LaDuke on the White Earth Reservation of Minnesota. As LaDuke prepared her daily dinner for her household of children, neighbors, interns, staff, and activists, Anishinaabe elder Michael Dahl posed the question: What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? We view this compelling question as eternally urgent. Eternal because it calls forth ancient wisdom and multigenerational ethics necessary for any human community to survive and thrive. Urgent because the planetary impacts of colonial overconsumption of resources and domination of peoples dramatically threatens the livability of this planet.

More than asking us how we want to be remembered, the question of What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? suggests that we are, always and already, ancestors—even if we never are remembered or never have children. The question deepens our awareness of the roots and reach of all of our actions and non-actions. In every moment, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not, we are advancing values and influencing systems that will continue long past our lifetimes. These values and systems shape communities and lives that we will never see. The ways we live create and reinforce the foundation of life for future generations. We are responsible for how we write our values, what storylines we further and set forth—the world we choose to cultivate for the lives that follow ours. So how are we to live?

The role of ancestor relies upon the realization of our descendants. Ancestry is an intergenerational practice of becoming, of change, in a world that, Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, is constantly in flux. Just as we prepare the young to step into adulthood and release childish ways for the health and growth of society, so the practice of becoming an ancestor requires the release of our grip upon what is, the letting go of certain ways of being in the world to embrace the changes required for the stream of life to keep flowing vigorously. We can begin to be living ancestors by stepping aside and handing over our power, our place, and our voice in ways that nurture those coming up. Those may be your own child, your grandchild, your neighbor’s child; those may be your former student, your young friend, your young colleague; those may be the young of other species, as Kimmerer writes in this volume, the grandchildren of warblers, bumblebees, and hemlocks. Ancestors empower the living. A good ancestor empowers the living to live well, so that life may flourish and the channel between ancestors and descendants may continue to flow. Being a good ancestor means understanding how to handle power, when to hold it, when to hand it over, and how to transform it. Just as our bodies, the fundamental sources of our power, will be transformed when breathing ends, so we can begin to practice being ancestors today by recognizing how we want to transform the power—the life force—we’ve been given. As Catriona Sandilands writes in this volume, Good ancestry is . . . a generous offering of one’s life to an unknown, multiplicitous future.

What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? is a question that we, the editors, believe is more important than ever to ask in 2020—when our communities have become fragmented by a global consumer society, when our selves have become isolated in a competitive and technologically driven economy, and when our spiritual, social, and ecological impacts on human and other-than-human beings extend farther than ever imagined due to globalization and climate change. In the midst of an ever-increasing upending of life, it is vital to reimagine how we live. We believe that this is a question that catalyzes dreams—dreams rooted in the instructions of the peoples and places that came before us; dreams that stretch our imagination long beyond our time on this sacred planet.

While we believe this question holds universal relevance for all members of our global community, it is rooted in the ethical traditions of the diverse Indigenous communities of Turtle Island. One of our coeditors, Melissa Nelson, from the Anishinaabe and Métis traditions, speaks to these roots:

As Indigenous communities, as tribes, as place-based citizens, as human beings, we know we would not exist without the love and struggle of our ancestors. Our DNA reminds us of this bond, what the late Dakota poet John Trudell called our Descendants-N-Ancestors. Because of this, through the links of time and countless generations, we strive to honor and recognize our ancestors in ceremony and ritual, song and dance, and daily acts of gratitude. We are all related, even to the unseen, and we recognized that our ancestors are with us in the river of souls (Milky Way), in the corn that we grow and eat, in the water we splash on our face every morning.

We are the result of the love of thousands, Linda Hogan reminds us. We exist because of the love and instinctual survival of our ancestors, and our love and regenerative power will create future generations, all those to come who are emerging from the ground of being to replace us as we return to Earth.

We are like trees with deep roots connected to our origins in the Earth, in soil, in rock, in stardust. We come from strong trunks, and numerous branches of ancestors loving and living and recreating to make our particular branch and ancestral thread. These are our family trees, our genealogies, what our Maori relatives call their whakapapa. In reflecting on what kind of ancestor we want to be, we wonder, how does the outer needle of a redwood branch 250 feet in the sky remember its ancestors in the redwood roots?

We are like rivers flowing from humble springs, where freshwaters emerge from primal wombs of fertility and rebirth. We are the result of all those ancestral waters flowing back to the liquid Mother. As we travel down mountains and along riverbanks, flowing between roots amongst liquid minerals and sediments, we merge with all those stories, all those memories, all those life forces. As our waters flow and grow and transform, we make habitat for new life—for spawning salmon, for mating otters, for sparring dragonflies, and other animal delights. This procreativity gives new life to new generations. We wonder, does a splash of freshwater meeting the salty sea for the first time acknowledge its ancestors in the mountain spring, in the river fog, in the thick, gray clouds? Ancestral waters are explored and honored throughout this book.

We are like seeds holding the sacred spark of life, ready for new growth when the conditions are right. We come from the kernels of our parents and carry their DNA within us. Throughout our lives we carry that fertility and potentiality for regeneration. That life force has many names to our people. It is the mysterious spirit of life itself, the manitou for Anishinaabeg; it is mana for the Hawaiians and Maori. It has many names even though it is ultimately nameless. Many young people, you will see, are exploring their ancestors through renewed relationships with their ancestral seeds and food traditions.

We are like fire, a spark of lightning meeting a pine snag and then two become one fire that consumes and grows with fuel and air. Fire is our ally, although we have made it an enemy. Winnemem Wintu Tribal Chief Caleen Sisk reminds us of the sacred role of fire as a revered teacher to Native peoples. Humans are currently out of balance with fire, thus we are experiencing devastating fires as we have forgotten that ancestral connection and need to be in right relation with it as an ancestor and relative. Noptipom Wintu ethnobotanist Sage LaPena reminds us that our relationship with outer fire recalls our relationship to our inner fire, and that too has to be tended to rebalance.

According to prophecy, twenty-first-century Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Potawatomie, and Odawa Native Peoples on Turtle Island) are people of the Seventh Fire, in a time of remembering and repairing and revitalizing ancestral lifeways that were disrupted from five hundred years of colonization. They are preparing and hoping to light the Eighth Fire, a time of a new people committed to peace and justice. To light this new, and prophecy says last, fire, they look to their human ancestors, especially the youth, and more-than-human ancestors, to cosmogenealogies that remind them we are all related, to the trees, soils, stars, seeds, and sacred sources of water and fire.

Please join us in asking this question of yourself, your family, your community, your human and more-than-human relations and elders, your ancestors and your descendants. We hope we have devised an engaging and enjoyable way for you to explore the question.

First, we have divided the book into six parts. Embedded explores the way in which being deeply connected to a place leads to understanding that our most powerful ancestors are those whose work, livelihood, hopes, and vision have shaped the environment. Reckoning investigates ways in which we struggle with past injustices to enact a more just future, whether through rethinking the violence that one’s position of privilege enjoys or understanding the exploitation exacted upon one’s own people long ago. Healing presents ways of recovery from cultural traumas faced by ancestors, enabling future generations to thrive. Interwoven looks to expansive ways in which we, as ancestors, will be remembered by how our values relate to the land and living communities. The integrity of our ancestry, ultimately, is predicated upon the integrity of the beings, systems, and communities that our values and practices enhance. Earthly looks for ancestors in the other-than-human world, and for instructions on how to live as humans from our other-than-human ancestors—other species and ecological communities. Seventh Fire returns us to how this journey began. Just as this book began with a question from Michael Dahl on Winona LaDuke’s White Earth Reservation back deck, so this book will look to the next generation of Indigenous leaders for the questions to guide us all as ancestors-in-practice. After pondering this question of eternal urgency, their messages are the ones we hope will remain in your hearts and minds and that you may live out into the world.

Finally, a word on the format. We hope you enjoy the mix of genres and the rhythm of forms in this book. We believe that the Ancestor question indeed taps into something ancient, something that the poets and oral storytellers of diverse cultures have talked about since the beginning of speech. Each section opens with a poem, continues with essays from varied perspectives and diverse authors on the question, moves into a conversational interview with a leading figure who has considered this question in the way they live, and closes with a poem. We hope this pattern will be enjoyable for all readers, and allow for you to settle into each section’s theme in one sitting. We also hope the mix awakens your senses, opens your heart, and engages you in dialog as you contemplate the many essays from numerous cultural communities—as you begin to respond to the Ancestor question yourself.

We are deeply grateful that you have joined us on this journey. You are our most important ancestors, those who will contemplate this question and renew its relevance long into the futures of humans and of all of our relations.

In Gratitude,

John, Brooke, Melissa, and Katherine

Poem: Unsigned Letter to a Human in the 21st Century

Jamaal May

Dear citizen of the binary mirror,

Dear wide-eyed and deft-fingered,

Dear deer in an ex-forest clearing,

Please forgive me if I’m speaking too soon.

Are you here yet?

Or is it that your presence only looks like arrival

because you can’t help but be the loudest ghost?

If that wasn’t you I saw

moving toward the edge of a cliff

like a moth to a moth

that flutters in flames,

no worries, I’ll leave this here for another time.

I write you because you asked me to,

though you may not remember the call,

though we may not have ever spoken.

But I heard it in your verse

after you bit your tongue

and bragged about the blood.

Dear aspirant to the throne

of Most Unassailable Victim,

I write you because when I opened my mouth

to say love, someone said sword again.

But Rumi said love,

and so I’m out in New England again

and in Detroit again

And in America still

with my ear pressed to this red book

and sure enough, the harsh sound

of a scabbard emptying

so that a belly could fill with blade

was drowned out for a moment,

as Love went running down the mountainside

out into the everything, becoming

the mad man again.

I closed my eyes and opened

what I didn’t know was locked inside,

and even now, I fumble for its name.

Could it have been the opening itself?

I write to confess I’ve known for years

that the closed-off parts of me

need the closed-off parts of you.

You are full of more you than is known,

and I confess I never bothered to notice.

But now I notice everything.

How my sink holds a sea,

overflows and becomes a

waterfall, becomes a puddle

at my feet. There’s an ancient article

from just seven years ago on waterboarding.

Another provides a litany

of the best ways to be ok with everything

our hearts stutter about: the bleach-white coral,

the pistol-full avenues,

the lucrative penitentiaries,

and women’s shelters that bulge with bruise.

They say the starved are guilty

of being hungry, and the head-scarfed girl

is guilty of living near the detonation,

and now I notice my hands—

how little they hold. They are teacups

bailing out this vessel

not worthy of any sea, and silence

is the rag stuffed into the mouth

of a gurgling drain. But I digress.

Dear digital city,

Scrolling around our world’s web

I opened another window

full of the seething news.

But this time, I could only laugh

at what Destruction had cloaked itself in.

If the gauze-like veil had a name, it would be

something along the lines of Inevitability.

But you are training in an alchemy

that can make those first three syllables fall away.

Destruction doesn’t know the strike

in the middle of it is past tense;

let the shark spin in its cage.

We only need to live long enough to teach

those who will, tomorrow,

drown it in the air.

My friend,

I write because I love you enough

to ask for what is terrible: run farther

than your feet can possibly carry your heart.

I love you enough to confess that you will fail

but fail closer to the finish line

than if you lie down when the start gun fires.

And in this way, you will never fail

to be arch, stepping-stone, bridge

of bone and intellect,

of guts and song. Look

how lively the children step.

Let’s nod our heads to their footfalls.

Become backbeat with me

and they will sing the harmonics

we forgot to learn.

Tell me you wouldn’t die for that.

Tell me you will live for this.

Love,

[Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books, from The Big Book of Exit Strategies]

* 1 *

Embedded

I am asked what kind of ancestor will I be. I struggle with the answer because I mistake it for asking about the future, but really it is calling me back to the places where I learned how to be.

Aaron A. Abeyta

POEM

Great Granddaddy

Taiyon Coleman

(for Frank Coleman)

1925 is a long time to be born black

outside of Greenwood, Mississippi,

the Choctaw and Chickasaw Delta

whose rich tributaries spit cotton

and soil and grow the grass

that your father’s only horse grazes

after he rides him in hidden places

between honey bees and leaves

while wearing a black top

hat that makes the white men,

who hide and sneak

in between the tall trees,

to buy and drink

your father’s homemade

whiskey, mad.

1940 gives its first taste of spring

and you are excited. Your father

has taught you how to search

and pick the right plants and herbs

for certain people,

in certain places,

and on certain occasions,

and today, your father

lies in his bed,

too sick to stand,

too sick to move,

and you are proud

that he trusts you

to gather herbs

to soothe

and to cure

what ails him.

Lavender and blue flowers

and wet spring roots are bright

in your black hands when you return

to the cabin in the Mississippi

woods, hesitant at first to enter

because the one horse that was

there when you first

left is now gone,

and your father’s black top

hat never far from his dusky

bald head, lies broken

and smashed in the red

clay dirt.

Intent in your task

as you are a good son,

and you know that children

are meant to be seen and not

to be heard, especially black

children, you boil the right

spring flowers and the right

spring roots while praying

to the right Gods,

honoring the right ancestors,

and sacrificing to the right

vengeful Spirits, you let

it cool for the right

amount of time, you drain

it through cleaned cheesecloth,

and you spoon it directly

to your father’s wide mouth

while holding his head

in your left hand

until you trust

that it’s enough.

Because he says nothing,

you know that you have

done a good job,

and three days later,

you will still

bury him in the secret

place where he told you

to cover him if a thing

like this happens,

and you conceal

the dirt and leaves

that conceal him

with your left-over

blue and purple flowers,

and orange roots.

And your light-skinned

momma, my great grandma

on her way to St. Louis,

will speak of forbearers,

of predecessors,

of poison,

and of a black man daring

to ride a brown spotted horse

while wearing a shiny black

top hat, missing jugs

of whiskey and money

to last a season,

and how easy

it is to kill

when sharing food

and water with someone

you trust.

ESSAY

Ancestor of Fire

Aaron A. Abeyta

I wish to be an ancestor of fire and how flames came to be, an ancestor of particular slants and dances of light. We are working in the half-light of a March dusk; the lambs run and jump as if they are born of sun reflected on ice. They rush to their mothers and their tails work furiously with joy as they suckle. Even then, as a boy, I somehow understood that those lambs, in that light, stood for hope and something greater than joy.

A few hundred yards to the south there are intermittent cracks of metal on wood, the unmistakable tone of my grandmother chopping wood. The small adobe house is at her back and the smoke of pine and aspen lingers above her home. My abuelita will take her load of wood, split thin as her wrists and the length of her forearm. She will stoke the fire and, on the steel stovetop that shines of countless fires, she will place milk to warm in a large pot.

At this distance, above the cacophony of dusk and putting the animals under the shed for the evening, I can hear my grandmother’s orphan lambs crying for their supper. She has them in a small pen next to the chicken coop and I am able to imagine them pressed against the chicken wire, their bleating a siren of hunger and of love for the only mother any of them have ever known. Every year she raises at least a dozen lambs. The circumstances of their orphandom are consistent, there is little in the way of variation—a mother ewe with too little milk to raise twins or triplets; a mother ewe too old; a mother ewe dead of bloating or a prolapsed uterus gone septic; or sometimes a mother ewe that simply did not know how to be a mother; and then there are the lambs that did not suckle, were sat upon by their oblivious mothers or those born out in the open, without shelter, nearly frozen to death, the ones we bring to the wood stove in the kitchen, the lambs we lay on old towels and blankets and feed with a dropper or a syringe, the ones that rarely survive but whose life we honor with our attempt at saving it. By the end of lambing season there are at least a dozen, usually more, that she has taken in. To the uninitiated they seem indistinct and impossible to tell apart. She knows them by sight, knows which she has fed and which she has not; she has given them simple and obvious names, the lamb with the spots on her nose is Pinto; the all white lamb is Blanca; the energetic one is Jumper and the smallest is Tiny; there is always a lamb named Curly and one named Brownie.

Every dawn, again at noon and then again at dusk, she makes her way to the pen next to the chicken coop; they hear her approach and they crowd the gate, poking their noses through the wire. Each lamb has its own bottle, but feeding them is chaos, they always seem so desperate and hungry, as though they may never eat again, the lambs always pressing at the bottle and feeding of the others; they are never full. Hunger seems to be the only memory the lambs possess, that and who their mother is, this short and stoic woman who carries two buckets filled with 12-ounce bottles to them three times a day. They bleat and sing out to her, the only mother they know or remember. We call them, collectively, pencos. My grandmother is blessed with the grace of loving things that others cannot or will not; living things are her gift.

On Fridays she bakes bread and every Sunday she roasts a chicken; she seems made entirely of work, custom, and survival. This is the ancestor I will be, like my grandmother working in the evening light. Did she know back then that she was teaching me to care for fallen and forgotten things? I remember her most often at the woodpile. She works in the wood chips and dust, generations of split wood, looking for slivers of pine and aspen, discarded reeds she knows will take a flame from a single match. She collects what others do not notice. She places her finds in a tin bucket. She saves what no one else uses or needs. Her cupboards are filled with homemade jelly and jars of buttons. Her actions tell me to collect everything; someday it will be of use. She precedes me, my ancestor.

I remember her working in the woodpile at dusk. One never imagines such a flame as exhaustible. Youth conspires to render such things as permanent. That fire is love and that love is fire, and neither can be extinguished. Age, however, puts truth into everything; it is the tree as it falls. Truth is the enemy of memory. Truth is the well from which brokenness is pulled up in a tin bucket. Were it not for truth she might be baking bread for centuries, collecting sticks that will always take a flame and mending shirts, every missing button easily replaced. I am a grandchild of a woman who knew work as innate, necessary, a direct descendent of survival. My abuelita’s faith was made not of prayer but of hope in collected things, rituals of kindness and patience.

I am told that I am an old spirit. I wonder sometimes how many generations I carry in me. Odd thoughts follow me like orphan lambs in single file behind their human mother. I wonder why I love the smell of smoke; why well water is sweetest when sipped; why lambs at their end, sprawled in front of the wood stove, thrash their legs as if running. Is every jar of jelly so sweet as to be undefinable? Must bread be baked only on Fridays? Will a bucket filled with sticks light enough fires to last for centuries?

Her house is empty now, barely standing but very much standing. The red shingles on the roof are in need of repair, the pictures, the kitchen table, the rooms are all like monuments to their last inhabitants. Her wood stove was removed, now in the garage; the wood box is empty, shelves barren as a January death. Silence lives there now, where before there was so much noise. Everything seems to be falling or fallen, the pens and the chicken coop are gone, the ditch that cut the yard in two rarely runs now; her lawn and her garden are likely gone forever. The woodpile is gone too, only the slivers of dust and splinters of wood scattered and disintegrating. My ancestor walked here once. I can see her move slowly from the front