Karen Pape

Lately, I have been wondering what happens when we die.   Where do we go?  Last summer, I began to research my family of origin for insight. A DNA test showed that I had  over 90,000 genetic matches on Ancestry.com, and I began to understand that, in a very real sense, we DO go on, if we have children, via our exponential genetic dispersal.  We are both expanded and diffused over generations.  I am still connected to my ninth great grandparents through tiny bits of code, although it is diluted and reimagined in a seemingly infinite variety of ways.

But what does that mean as we look backwards?  Are we just bits of other people’s code and merely reinventions of old memories?  Is any part of us unique?   My early vivid experiences with Déjà vu tell me that it is conceivable that genetic memory will be discovered to exist.  Perhaps it is what causes me to tear up at the sound of a lonely Appalachian fiddle. That is one of the many gifts the people in these images have given me.

This project arose from these thoughts and ideas. “Leavings” involved making transparent positives of my ancestor’s portraits and creating chlorophyl prints on native tree leaves indigenous to the valley where they lived for 200 years. I then took the leaves and photographed them as they dried and disintegrated.  I photographed the leaves over several months and created 10 scrolls of five images. The process was quite intimate as there were many failed attempts due to heat punctuated by endless rain, and I began to feel that these people were speaking to me and telling me their stories.

Speaking The Bones

In my Appalachian family, there were so many of us. Our large families were planted and grew on the sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains for hundreds of years. We eked out a hard life on steep, rocky ground.  We grew with a fierce strength sculpted from the harsh soil, coupled with a softness born from cool foggy mornings and the sad cry of the mourning dove. Our family was always together. But, then, like maple seeds, we twirled on the breeze and were gone to other places. We left, went to college, married people “from away.”  Death, time and smaller families gradually felled our tree, and politics split the rest in two.

And now, my granddaughter is an only child.  Three cousins she barely knows live 500 miles away.  She has an uncle and an aunt she rarely sees.  There are no family reunions, no loud playing in the dusk, no raucous fireworks on the Fourth of July.  Animals are her siblings and friends, and she feels no sense of loss. And yet, the elders live in her bones and blood. Their story, sprinkled with her own magic, arises differently in her  and pirouettes into an unseen future.  She is unfettered by the past, yet she is tied tight by bits of code. She carries what remains of them and reinvents it as her own.

I, too,  am what remains.   I am the holder and conveyer of memory and story, the keeper and teller of the bones.  I am lonesome for the songs that have become dim and a dialect that is mostly silent in me.  I am both a part of them and apart from them.  I seek them in the spaces between the land and sky,  in the water, and at the edges of things, between here and there.   I hear them just around the corner. I see them dancing in a slant of light and shadow.  I remember them in my dreams.  And when they  find their way to me,  I speak the bones.  I sing the song and dance on the winds of memory.