Rachael Lynn Nevins
Matrilineage

No one has ever been able to answer my questions about
my great-grandmother Anna Harasymowicz,
that village girl from Poland, and whatever discontentment
drove her to Hamburg and the steamship Amerika, which took her
half a world away, to a job as a nanny
in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Her plan was to earn a lot of money
and return home, but instead she cooked meals
for the students at the American School for the Deaf,
met and married my great-grandfather, raised three children,
and grew older and older until she became
the oldest person I ever knew.
Every time we saw her I was introduced again, as her
daughter’s daughter’s daughter. Gloria’s daughter.
Incomprehensible daughter of the New World,
of the Connecticut suburbs, of all-Honors classes, SAT prep, Ivy League
aspirations. Gen-X daughter of Second-Wave feminism,
Cold War fears, MTV. Daughter shutting herself up in her bedroom,
drawing pictures, writing in her journal, writing poems. Wildly
impractical daughter with her own renegade dream: to escape to the city
and make of herself something different, something entirely herself.
Great grand-daughter of whom Anna never could have dreamed.
I kissed her thin cheek, and she gazed at me
through thick glasses with watery eyes. By then
she spoke only Polish and hardly knew who I was.