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  • Where They Came From, Where They Went, and: Classroom with Landscape, and: “Rain Coming from a Bright Sky”
  • Judith Kitchen (bio)

Where They Came From, Where They Went


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I’d like to think they belong to me—or I to them—this young couple who appear to be on shipboard. Young, and healthy, and staring into the sun. Staring westward, I imagine, looking toward that moment they will land in the country of their dreams. It’s the mid-1800s, maybe, and they will make their way to Buffalo, New York, and then on to Michigan where my grandmother will be born. I’d like to think they were mine—and by all rights they should be, handed to me (as they have been) by the woman in the photography shop, the woman who carefully handled and sorted my family, scanned their brief histories into the machine that put them on a disk where I now hold their thin metallic future. But when I sorted through the originals looking for handwriting on the backs, terse identifications of the people I’ve never met, I could not find this shot. And I don’t remember giving it to the proprietor, don’t remember seeing it, ever. Somehow this couple has made [End Page 9] their way—insinuated themselves—into my family lore, raising their glasses with the rest of them to what I may (or may not) find of the lives they actually led.

So here they are, my (theoretical) great–grandparents, so different from the stiff faces that stared down from their perch in the front hallway of my childhood. Here they are, wind in their hair, and something else—a readiness in their faces that I don’t recall as part of my heritage. Just look at the way she squints her half-smile while he stares, shadowed, into the lens. Just look at the way the wind lifts her scarf and curls around her like a purring cat. I like to think, by the half-seen elbow in the background, that behind him someone is playing the harmonica. That the song, too, coils in the wind, but not before he has heard its eager call.

They’ve left the old life behind—the one they might have led if they’d stayed—and now they are suspended between what they know and what I now know better than they ever could. Between what they might have thought they could be and what they eventually became. From this moment on, they will pose for those others, the ones in the old country whose spidery letters recount people and places they will never see again. Just as their own rough handwriting will spill out opportunity—a clapboard house, a mill, two children who retain a smattering of German even as they skip off to school. Or rather, in the case of their son Carl, limp off to school in the special shoe the cobbler made for his club foot, the shoe that twisted his twisted bones back toward the true—at least enough to get him to school and, later, to walk him every day to the drugstore where he worked an entire life.

Carl would have been the age of that other cousin Karl—the one in that other life—who posed somewhere in Glashutten, Bavaria, with his wife and son in 1937. There is the old garden—the one they might have had—with a lace-covered table and a decanter of sherry. At least it looks like sherry, but the glasses are too large (and too full) for it to be sherry. So wine. And only two glasses for three people, so we assume this is for the two men. Some occasion. Look, her right hand holds a blossom in her lap and her left hand covers something—a box? Who knows? Look again, there’s something on the table, in the foreground—a ribbon of some sort, crimped at the edges, shaped like a sun. How prim and proper it all looks, staged, and how impossible to freeze the forced smiles, to hold so stiff and still.

What will...

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