I study an old photograph of an ancestor long dead as an infant, in the days when boys and girls alike wore dresses while young, and ponder that I never knew this baby . . . that I am so much older now than he then . . . that his blue-eyed genes reside somewhere inside my brown-eyed self . . . and wonder whether the old man who may have known me means his child self knew me too?
Outside I long to capture the footprints I left last night alongside the later cat prints and earlier bird prints all alongside each other, as if we three walked side-by-side in the night snow.
Time layers itself upon time – back- and forward – until I come back to the child in the photograph, so happy on Mother’s lap, looking forward into a time that is already past, and I seek out the old man the child has become and gone and wonder if his own footprints rest somewhere in time, side by side, the baby and the man.
