In an old photo, my great-great-grandmother in her long black dress holds my infant self in trailing blankets and a long white gown on her lap while my great grandmother, my grandmother, and father are grouped around us. It amazes me that they all lived out their lives within mere miles of each other, given how rootless my own little family is. My children and I are scattered around the country, as is true of many families now. We have to travel to be together, and it’s not always possible for us all to be in the same place at the same time. But behind that old photo, there are so many Sunday dinners, so many weddings, and funerals, so many accreted layers of memory and tradition.

There was comfort in predictability, in family stories, in knowing all my cousins and neighbors and church ladies and teachers. The whole town seemed to come through my aunt’s dry goods store or beauty parlor at one time or another, and I went through every grade of school with my best friend who was born a week or so before I was.

But at the same time, there was also a kind of strangulation, a need to cut the cords. Strong skeins of DNA held me firmly in place until I left home, and even though everyone in this photo is gone, I still feel the tug of that double-stranded helix that I imagine contains my grandmother’s creativity, my mother’s loneliness, my grandfather’s cheekbones. It’s a tug of deep homesickness, but I know that what I’m searching for is less a physical place than a time before I kept time, that moment on my great-great grandmother’s lap when it was all new--the grass the greenest, the sky the bluest, the world a gift that was waiting to be opened.

Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.