One day, summers ago, I saw my physical duplicate crossing a quiet side street in small town Michigan. A visit “home,” I was driving somewhere to somewhere else, a nondescript errand in a place often defined by them, I stopped at an unnecessary stoplight, waiting for nonexistent cars to pass. I looked to my left and there she was, a medium brown-haired woman in early middle age, slightly taller than average, laden with a heavy bust, a gentle stomach paunch and no rear cargo to speak of. Her legs stretched long and trim, not fit necessarily, just not her body’s primary repository for excess weight. Clad in navy leggings and a faded white shirt decorated with tiny blue flowers, she was my familiar.
The bright of the sun shadowed around her, the open landscape of the dark asphalt street, the reflective green of the Midwestern lawns in June brought the vision of her around to me like a mirror. That is my body, that is where I am from, the genetic heritage of this self I call me. In all my clamoring for some uniqueness, some self-purchase in the world, the woman I saw that afternoon was the commonality of my package, my brand.
In the next split second I saw both of us, this unknown woman and myself, as our foremothers in blue flowered farmhouse dresses, our hair tied up under handkerchiefs in a sunny farmhouse in the empty wilds of what was pioneer America. Descended, the both of us, from the hearty stock of European settlers whose thick bodies nourished dreams of a greater life, a better life, a self-determined life.
This is my tradition, the seeking I carry forward with my farm maid’s body, the search for a bigger life, a freer life, a life of the mind. It is this search that had led me to a “reverse immigration” of a sort, from the Midwest to the Northeast. It is a tradition I can see in my daughter, raised in the urban landscape that is New York City. She dances, she leaps, she plays with more strength and aplomb than I remember in myself. In her, I visualize the shift to the best of it all a beautiful, strong, productive body, and elastic, intellectual and compassionate mind.
And when I look at it that way, look at life from the distance of centuries to the very day, I feel gratitude and a splash of awe at the feats this farm maid’s body has accomplished.
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Jessica Ciosek’s work appears in the “Mothers” issue of Minerva Rising.
