proof is piling up

I keep a notepad and pen handy at all times. I wear old tired clothes in the shop all week, sometimes the same shirt - bearing soup stains at times - four days in a row. Not that these things bother me or are in any way unusual in many countries... but they do point to something.

I build birdhouses, write a story or two on a regular basis, live frugally, question most everything and when a new idea pops into my head when I'm out and about, and my notepad is back home on my desk, I jot it down on any scrap of paper at hand. None of these behaviours bother me but proof is piling up. I'm turning into my father. And my mother. Maybe my great-grandmother as well.

["This scrap of paper is about more than a beehouse"]

With my hair growing grayer and longer as we speak, I'm slowly turning into a person that simultaneously is still like the kid that was a childhood resident of Norwich, Ontario (a village I consider my first hometown) but growing more like the adults in my family and extended family. And though London is my second hometown, and the one I've lived in the longest, I've been thinking more about Norwich and my connection to my father and mother and great-grandmother in the last few months than at any other time in my life.

Something's going on and I'm not fully sure what it is.

Do we have a homing instinct like a pigeon or Coho salmon? (Cohoes lived in Norwich when I was a kid. I wonder if some still do?)

Do we think more of our roots or want to return to them as we grow older? (The roots of the old maple that stood for over a century behind our house in Norwich likely reached all the way to China.)

Do we slowly morph into people similar to dozens of our ancestors as years are added onto our age? (I realize now I possess my dad's outward stature, my mom's skeleton, a blend of my parents' natures, my great-grandmother's name (Gordon) and facial features (lovely, but wrinkled) and the Harrison desire to have people look at what I'm doing. Want to see my new birdhouse? Come on out back.)

["I'll make the hardware myself," says the Catton-side of my brain]

These thoughts ran through my head this morning as I opened a bit of paper in my wallet that contained a week-old sketch of a beehouse. (I'd seen one at a birdhouse store and felt I could make a few in my shop.) While I'm putting a few together I'll enjoy a sense of companionship with the parents, aunts, uncles and grand-parents that are somehow connected to the ancestral wiring that exists between my brain and fingertips.

Though proof is piling up I'm not myself anymore, I think I'll be able to live with the wrinkles.

Photos by GH
 
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Please click here to read about and view great-grandmother Gordon.