I’m Like an Onion or Like the Rings Inside a Tree Trunk

I guess I can see now why people are split almost smack-dab down the middle when it comes to saying which sister Evie looks more like.  Some say Sadie.  Some say Abbie.

And some say she just looks like, well, Evie.

I would have to agree with those people.  But I would also have to add that she looks like both herself and everyone else in the family.  She is a compilation of her history, a collage of her past.  She is a perfect rendering and editing of all who came before her.  As are her sisters.

As I write this post, I’m reminded of a story called “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros of The House on Mango Street fame.  (I am an English teacher, for Pete’s sake.  It’s hard to think or write about anything without my brain making some literary connection.)  In this story a little girl named Rachel speaks of her eleventh birthday and says that “when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.”  She says you are “kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like [her] little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.”  That is how we think of our daughters:  each is her own person, but her ancestry and her parentage make her a derivative as well.  Our daughters are off-shoots, branches of the genealogical family tree, and they go twisting and turning in all directions, hopefully carrying with them the wisdom of their ancestors as they struggle to move onward and upward.  (Yeah.  Metaphors are part of the English-teacher-shtick too.  Sorry.)

Evie looks like many of us from her family:  We see signs of Abbie in Evie’s eye shape and nose; we see snippets of Sadie in Evie’s eye color and her little puckered, sometimes overly serious lips and her contemplative brow (although Sadie has some heavy-duty eyebrows while Evie, well, Evie has yet to grow any at all).  I see signs of the girls’ Great Uncle Bob in the way Evie cocks one eyebrow up and then hitches the opposite side of her mouth up too.  I see Mama Teeta’s square face shape, Papa Genn’s hairline (had to get that one in there, right, Papa?), Uncle Cooter’s lighter skin and possible freckles later on, Grandma Anne’s little ears, the sparkle of Grandpa Thurman’s eyes, the  pointy chin from Aunt Sherie, Uncle Chester’s dimples.

I see me.  All the time, I see myself when I stare into her bright blue, nearly periwinkle eyes—clichéd, yes, but it’s like looking in a mirror sometimes.  I see that she will have my eye shape, as Abbie does, and she will inherit—sadly—my “hammer toe,” which has plagued three generations of women on my mother’s side…Evie will make four.  May she find a good podiatrist later in life and have the money to afford well-made, high-arched shoes with adequate support.

And I see Jack, too.  The way her nose goes straight down and then does this quick little ski jump at the very tip.  That’s total Jack.  And when she sticks out her tongue—as babies are wont to do so often—she’s all his too.  He might not realize it, but he does that when he’s embarrassed about something.  It only proves that Evie is his…and not the mailman’s….as my other children are.  Joking.  Come on, people.  Just joking.

Layer after layer.  Ring after ring.  Doll inside doll.  Evie is all of these people, and Evie is Evie.  A very few times in her oh-so-short life, I’ve caught a glimpse, just an ephemeral glance, of what I imagine she’ll look like when she’s older:  delicate features, inquisitive countenance, quick to grin, open, frank, a tad serious.  Beautiful.

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