Day 8: Keeper of the Flame

I am back from Kingston, home of my birth, and feeling quite reflective on what I found there…  Not only did I find my grandmother in a new hospital by the lake, doing relatively well (see Let Sleeping Lions Lie);  I found myself with my mother, and countless photos and letters dug up among boxes and boxes of stuff in my grandmother’s sun-porch…

Nanna's sunporch

In these boxes, we found my great-great grandparents Lawrence E. Moore and Emma Belle Deacon staring out from their front porch rockers in Haileybury…

Lawrence and Emma Moore on the front porch in Haileybury 1920s

and their seven daughters (my great aunts), girls and women in tranquil Georgian-style dresses lounging on the front swing with flowers in their hair, or leaning with snowshoes and warm-mittened hands against the family’s seemingly chicken-wired fence;  my gr-great grandmother Emma standing solidly with her youngest one wrapped around her skirt, she looking quite tired but still strong in the heat of days… and another where she smiles brightly to camera, which delighted me beyond measure.

Moore Women in Cobalt

These are the Moores I had always wanted to know, to play cards with at the dining room table (which is now in my mother’s dining room); to tell stories with, laugh with…   I see Emma playing the  mouth organ (which is now in my grandmother’s hall closet); I hear their old Irish twang and crazy war-time songs (I shall never repeat them here – we were Protestant Northern Irish, if that says enough).

Moore women at dining table

Emma Moore playing the mouth organ

I feel like I know these women. I am bonded to them.  I am proud to be one of them. I see myself in their tall languid frames, the way they held their hands, tilted their heads, played up to camera. The Moore Women.

I am a part of a long, and timeless heritage of strength and self-assurance. Of continuity. Of beauty. And of rebuilding. Death after death has taken them. But their faces tell me another story; they are still here, in my blood and in those whom I love now.

My grandmother had protected and shielded these treasures for years and years. She didn’t have the heart to go through them, or dispose of anything. I’m glad she didn’t. I’m glad I had the opportunity with my mother to get on my hands and knees and know this family I inherited.

The details won’t matter so much. The garbage bins will go out; the trinkets will disappear. But their eyes, their hands, their laughter and their tears will never go out in me.

I am blessed to be here, the Keeper of the Flame.

Me in my red boots in Nanna's backyard

P.S. I will be posting more family finds in my other blog, That’s Relative!..    Thank you for visiting.