41st Thread: Your daughter will be my grandmother

My mother is your grandmother, you will be the mother of your daughter who will never sow. Inserting the seed is a man’s job, but who knows if he will be there to harvest. My mother died young. She worked as a hired hand in the farms. So are we. We have always been hired hands, that’s our fate. The saints decide at birth if we shall be queen or peasant. We must pray to them at all moments of the day because they are everywhere, in plants as in rivers. The healer sees them. If she crosses herself, the deer drinking from a source reveals her holy form. If the healer kneels down in the forest, the lord who seemed a tree blesses her by raising a branch.

The priest says, no, no, do not listen to the healer, the saints belong only in the sky. Why does he tour a sacred statue to bless the plowing, if the saints are not in the fields? We pray to a saint for the surrounding wall to resist attacks, to another for the winters to become gentle again, and the summers sunny, yet to another for the man to stay. If we can not ask the saints to help us, what is left to us, the poor? Work, pain, hunger. The sky one day, above the clouds. I’m explaining to you the meaning of the world, so that everything becomes clear. You scythe and you’re my daughter, your daughter will be my grandmother, as I sieve, and her grandmother is the daughter of her daughter, because you look like my mother, as the men beat the cereal and we winnow. All little girls take after their grandmothers more than their mothers, you understand, because only the saints follow time on its return. If it is woven in the opposite direction, the thread undoes the work, when the time comes back, and we baptize grandmothers with the same blessed name as their granddaughters?

Click on image of drawing to reveal the work of art that inspired it

This is the 40th woman of 100 mothers talking to their daughters, over 2500 years.

The 40th mother lived in the woods. The 39th woman hears her grandmother’s confession. The 38th woman left the cave where she grew up. The 37th woman recommends thinking of an animal during labor. The 36th woman finds refuge in a cave. The 35th woman remembers her easy life in the city. The 34th woman’s life as a courtesan upsets her zealous mother. 

Early Christianity:

The 33rd mother worries her daughter will be sold into prostitution. The 32nd woman washes her dead father’s body.  The 31st woman and her mother convert to the new religion. The 30th woman marries under duress. 

It all starts here: first thread, and the last stories will take place in … present day America.