So it started with a broken laptop. Or maybe it started with your brother, pointing you towards a target, that wasn’t me by any means, but I was somewhere on the other side of it.
Or maybe it started with an offer made to my Grandfather, which he passed onto my mother and her new husband. Or maybe it started with a newspaper ad, Welshmen need not apply. Or maybe it started in Ireland, with a broken engagement and a ferry ticket.
Or maybe we are so far from the start there is no point loosing myself on the path back to it.
The sun rose again,
and the weather changed its tune
but that’s not the start.
Carol J Forrester 
Each time we believe we have found a beginning we realize it’s necklaced to an end… for beginnings we should look forward.
Wise words Bjorn.
Your haibun made me smile, Carol, and made me think of Flan O’Brien and Spike Milligan.
Thank you Kim. I’m glad I could make you smile.
It is all linked, like a fine golden chain.
It is indeed.
What I adored about this piece was all the scintillating tidbits of your history and life, connected by DNA and happenstance, each tweaking my interest, each begging for back story; excellent job.
Thank you. I’ve actually written some of those backstories and posted them on the blog, and included others in my book. I do wonder if people will get sick of me going ‘let me tell you about another member of my family!’
Waxes and wanes, in perpetuity.
Indeed.
Like Glenn, my interest was piqued by the snippets of your history. Very clever!
Thank you. I’ve quite literally written a whole collection based on snippets of my history so I was worried that I was perhaps flogging a dead horse by this point.
Interesting post Carol. So many things go into a new beginning. Hard to pin it down to just one of them.
Perhaps there are no beginnings and now ends, just continuation.
Sounds like the way things are for us.
So many beginnings…..especially as we go back beyond our lifetimes, to our ancestors’. Loved your poem.
Thank you.
such a creative write which reminded me of the butterfly effect. really well done.
Thank you, that was what I was thinking about as I wrote it.
You’re welcome, Carol
Wonderful. Off the beaten track.
Thank you. I’m not sure I’d find my way back to the track by this point. Pretty sure children mistaken me for the witch in the swamp at this point.
If so you must be doing something right! 🙂
I love what Bjorn said and I love your haibun. The path is crooked to the future.
It’s crooked in all directions I think.
I think you are right
I love this!
Thank you Linda.
Simply fabulous poem about beginnings…how far back do we go?
…haibun, not poem 😉
I debated writing about when we first crawled out of the sea but I thought people might not quite get that far is the poem went on that long.
You might lose a few along the way 😉 I read that scientists studying DNA have linked us all back to one specific pair of human ancestors!
Interesting the way you teased with the little bits of family tales and the mysterious not knowing beginnings or endings
Happy New Year
Much🎆love
Happy New Year to you too.
I did a family tree a while back, and on my mother’s side it goes back hundreds of years, (back to 1066 if you believe the family stories). It always makes me wonder, what if one person had chosen differently, how would those ripples play out.
Loved this! A genealogists dream . . . or nightmare. This made me think of trying to find the beginning of a morning glory plant that had run amok in our yard years ago. We’d pull and pull on a vine and the attached root, but it was never the main root, the beginning.
Ah, that stresses me out just think about it. A very apt analogy however.
ah….the fun, the frustration, the challenges, the disappointments, the excitement of tracking back…trying to go backwards to discover. I’m thinking of the ancestry and 23and me tests that are so popular right now that trace back to our beginnings….and the people who suddenly find something shocking in the results. There’s a comfort sometimes in the past — Swedish pancake tradition, cherishing our heritage….but there can also be a space suddenly, when we do something or say something and we go “oh oh”….that’s my mother coming out in me! (If it’s a part of her we do not want in ourselves!). Well, you’ve got me thinking here….and that is sure the effect of good writing! 🙂
Enjoyed this one!