With help from my sister Ruthanne, who is a history scholar and an expert researcher, I have been working on a family tree. The process is like assembling a jig-saw puzzle, fitting parents to their parents and grandparents, gathering details of births, marriages, and deaths, finding the missing link that connects a distant branch. The chart that we're building shows a mixed heritage of farmers, businessmen, merchants, military officers, teachers, lawyers and accountants, some Anglican, Jewish, Quaker, Baptist and Catholic, hailing from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, British India, Canada and the U.S. Our ancestors include salt of the earth and book-learned people, rich and poor folks, a few famous and most quite ordinary.
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| My grandmother |
As one works further back in time, it becomes clear that nothing much has changed throughout history. It's true that families are smaller today, and more spread out geographically, but in the course of our lives we experience the same trials and triumphs that our distant relatives dealt with. There are losses: babies who don't survive, sons who go off to war and never return, failed marriages, mental illness, bankruptcy, flu epidemics, and tragic accidents. There are successes and celebrations, too: graduations, awards, job promotions, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and the honour of special recognition from colleagues and friends. I know that the cycle continues when I see the happy face of my baby granddaughter Victoria reflecting her mother's sweet smile. Our wishes for the next generation (and the ones after that) are the same hopes that my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother had for their children and grandchildren. It makes me feel stronger and more capable when I look at the enduring, widespread branches of the family tree and find my place firmly rooted there.
"The Wishing Tree" a poem by Kathleen Jamie, expresses this sense of continuity with simple, resonant words and imagery. The poet writes, " One day walking in Argyll with my husband, we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn't know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or desire - I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one in Scotland."
I love the way past and present merge in this poem, just as our family tree brings the deceased closer to the living. As we approach the end of one year and the beginning of another, and make our resolutions for change in a period of global uncertainty, the wishing tree reminds us that "hope springs eternal in the human breast."
The Wishing Tree
I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland,
but in the fold
of a green hill,
the tilt from one parish
into another.
To look at me
through a smirr of rain
is to taste the iron
in your own blood;
because I bear
the common currency
of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.
My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins; I draw
into my slow wood, fleur
-de-lys, the enthroned Britannia.
Beyond, the land reaches
toward the Atlantic.
And though I'm poisoned,
choking on small change
of human hope, gently
beaten into me, look:
I am still alive;
in fact, in bud.
- Kathleen Jamie 2002
To hear a recording of the poet reading this work
click here.
Wishing you a Happy New Year!
