Kathryn Ruth

As my newly discovered second cousin sends more photos of my mom's side of the family, I find myself without words looking at snapshots of time and places and faces that are so foreign to me and yet they are genetically a part of me. These people are part of my cellular structure. I never knew my maternal grandmother, Kathryn Ruth Varner Simonds. She died in 1970, 5 years before I was born. I carry her name...My full name is Kathryn Ruth.

This is a picture of her at the home of my great-grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Simonds (my grandfather's parents which would make this her in-laws house). On the porch is my mom. My great-grandparents lived in Carrollton, Illinois. I never knew that, but then again, there's lots of things I never knew about my family.

I wish this photo could talk. I wonder what this woman would say to me, the person who carried on her name. She has been such a dominant and driving force in my life even though she died 5 years before I was born. But it was her life, and her death, that has shaped my life for better and for worse. I am learning karmic lessons from this story that doesn't end with physical death. When I was a teenager, I had this vision in the middle of the night and I know that my grandmother came and talked with me about all kinds of life things. It is a vision that has comforted and supported me for many years.

A few years ago, at the home of my grandmother's sister, I learned some interesting stories about my grandmother, including her short love affair with a French fighter pilot preceding World War II. She met him when she was the librarian at Weatherford College. And it explains why in the Weatherford College yearbooks, the name Kathryn Fauviere was listed beneath her picture. What a woman to fall in love with a French fighter pilot. I only got to hear that story once that day, and no one else in the family will talk about it.

I wonder what this woman in the foreground would say to me today, an expectant mother. I wonder about this woman in the background...my mother.