Martha Caroline

When I was a child there were a few occasions when I insisted that I had to have been adopted. I was serious. For the most part, we grew up around members of Mom's family. And my three siblings very much resembled those Norwegian extracted relatives. From among the granddaughters, I was the shortest and the only one with dark hair. I was a shrimp among blonde Amazon-like creatures. The only reasonable explanation was that I was adopted. When I shared this observation with my mother, she wryly remarked that I was not chosen, that I had been thrust upon them. At the age of eight this sounded vaguely sexual to me and I pressed her no further for clarification. The summer I turned fourteen I came into possession of a group photograph of my paternal grandmother and her three sisters. This is her, Martha Caroline Register Broome at around sixteen years of age. Mom was right. I wasn't adopted after all, I just took after the side of the family that I was less familiar with. I think it would be fun to recreate this photo with me in a similar dress and hairstyle. Using extremely soft focus. At my current age, I can see how I resemble my mother and sister more than ever before. This is the only photo I have of Martha Caroline, so I have no idea if I now look like she did in her fifties. One thing I do know, my life has been very different from hers. I expect she was never more than a hundred miles from where she was born. She taught school as a young woman but mostly she was a farm wife who raised four sons and two daughters. I find myself wondering what hopes and dreams lay behind the eyes of this lovely young woman. If any of them came true. If she was happy. I have no reliable memories of her, I only saw her when I was a toddler and she died when I was nine at the age of seventy-five. I regret that I never really knew her.