Miss Minnie Story Watson.
It has a ring to it,
don’t you think?
She sounds small
but tough.
Resilient and fragile.
Proud but also fearful.
She’s not afraid of hard work,
no, not Minnie Story Watson.
She’s afraid of being forgotten.
Of being folded into the past
alongside other women
whose names we no longer remember.
We lost them along the way
as we rushed to be somewhere else
and then forgot how we got here,
why we exist or what makes us who we are.
Minnie Story Watson knows all about that.
She forgot herself.
She doesn’t know anything
other than the pine-tree-studded forests
of McDuffie County, Georgia
where she lives with her family on a cotton farm.
On a warm summer night with a light wind from the south,
Minnie Story Watson believes she can smell the sea.
She begins to dream of a life she never knew
on the banks of Loch Linnhe
in Scotland.
Faded memories, perhaps embellished or re-written,
passed down from generation to generation
from mother to mother to mother.
Told with pride as the torchbearers of the past,
but secretly in the hope
no one will forget on their watch.
Minnie Story Watson has never been to that loch
or smelled that sea,
but on these warm summer Georgia nights
the dampened pine needles from the rain the night before
stand in for the cotton grass,
bog myrtle
and pillwort
her ancestors recite in their stories.
She smooths her jet black hair
away from her face
and ties it back with pale blue ribbon.
A few strands fall gently
around her heart-shaped face.
She breathes in the damp pine needle air
and thinks about what her life would be
away from this oak and ash clapboard house
with not one stitch of paint.
Minnie Story Watson.
She knows her heart. She wants to know her past.
Minnie Story Watson breathes in the air of her ancestors
and begins to see the dark, still waters of Scotland
framed by pillwort, bog myrtle and cotton grasses
and knows what was
will never be.
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