As I now look at the picture again more closely, I see that Ann’s left leg is standing at an odd angle. In this picture, my father’s right leg is standing at an odd angle. His chest is big and strong looking. He hardly looks ill but Bob [Cuskey] told me that that summer that Dad had really lost weight and was very skinny. I look at the picture and wonder who were the people in the back ground. Then when I turned the picture over, there is my mother’s handwriting, I know it so well. Its comforting just to look at it….and she has answered my question. “Sag Harbor-1947, Bill and Ann Cuskley, A neighbor in the background.”

From almost 60 years ago, when she was pregnant with me, she answered the question of this almost 60 year old woman sitting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She wasn’t thinking of me, of course. She was probably thinking of her parents whom she sent the picture to. Her mother had just turned  61 as she read this….my grandmother Hattie Dieter, both of us almost exactly the same distance from 60, she 14 months past 60, me 6 months before 60, so close as we look at this picture . My mother stands between us, bridging my grandmother and me.

My mother had written on back of all four pictures I had from Sag Harbor. In a sprawling beautiful script. “Sag Harbor, 1947 Katie fresh from her tub,” “ Sag Harbor-1947, Katie-2,  Charlotte- 3 ½.  This was taken in the bay just in front of our cottage.” “ Sag Harbor -1947 Bill Bobby & Bob Cuskley.”

Here, I have in front of me something my mother wrote when she was pregnant with me. Something she wrote when she was trying not to think that my father was very ill and there was a very real possibility that he would die soon. The optimism is in her script. It has always been there. The go ahead spirit. That must have been the spirit of that summer at Sag Harbor.

The bridge that my mother forged by writing on the back of that photo, so that her mother could read it and then 60 years later I could read it, has a history.

It has a history of women, mothers and daughters and grandmothers spanning generations to pass information forward.

When my grandmother was born in 1886 in El Paso, Texas, she was her mother’s fourth child. Her own mother, Helen, in Germany would never see the three babies who were born in America. It was Hattie’s mother, Lena,  who had to bridge the gap between these generations. And although Lena might have left her mother and her homeland with the thought of being glad to get away from so much austerity, she without a doubt passed onto her daughters the same austerity her mother had taught to her.

It seems Lenchen left Germany in a huff as a young women, I imagine with the fire of Katie, in love with a man who wanted to take her far away from her family. If she had been like me, she would have stayed close to home in 1880….she, certainly like Katie, became very conservative and raised her children that way too….unlike me.

Helen…Barenz, Lena Berenz Dieter, Hattie Dieter Elsner…there is a continuity there in the names alone which suggests a connection. And since Hattie was the only one of Lena’s daughters to have children, this bond continued to the next generation.

It was Lenchen, as it was later her granddaughter Maxine, who worked to bridge the generations….and which one of my grandaughters—will it be so—may carry forward.

For I think my mother knew that night when she wrote on the back of those photographs that she was writing for the future….even though she did not know what that future was.