Photo courtesy of Anne Owens

Martha Chesnutt in Okinawa, Japan, 1945 or 1946.

Buried deep down in some red river valley way down in Texas is a woman I loved and never knew. I would have put on my pilgrim's hat, picked a dozen yellow roses and sailed down to hear her stories, but she took them way down in that ground with her.

My great-aunt Alice, my grandmother's older sister and last surviving member of the Texas Chesnutts, died. I don't know when and gave no announcement to her extended relations.

Her death didn't end my pilgrimage. It was just a big gust of wind that turned my tide. Now I'm bobbing, waiting for another to blow me to another stranger who can tell me who I am. I'm waiting to be blown way back to a home I never knew.

How are we so different from our predecessors? Except for an inherent fear of ankles and some goofy ideas about what should happen when you add a woman to water, how are we any different at all? When you break us down to our most elemental functions, we're all just hapless idiots searching for sanctuary. We're all just waiting for the tide to take us home. We puff our sails with hope as big as the Texas sky and not much more.

Someone told me a little while ago that turkey not only has the capacity to put you to sleep, but pacifies the need to find your roots. Amazing food, turkey. It must have some chemical, just as simple, that takes us back to where we came from. Maybe it's the down home in the mashed potatoes. There must be something, at least once a year, which brings us back to all the stories that belong to us, even if we never knew them.

I wanted a face that looked like my face to tell me where I came from. I wanted to fill in the gaps of the lives that ran their courses and created my life. What I wanted, really, was my grandmother.

I wanted to measure the contours of her grace and puff my sails with her big hopes. I wanted to check again the movements of her hands, and hold them up against my own, and see what that fourth of me has brought. I wanted to lock down the fading memory of her and make it tangible. I knew her like a child knows a grandmother. I wanted to know her now like one woman knows another.

I don't know if I could have found my grandmother in Texas. She and her sister were different creatures. Alice waded around muddy Texas waters and called them her home. My grandmother got herself a pair of oars and paddled away.

When she was 16, my grandmother graduated from high school and went to a Texas college. Within a few months, her father came to drag her home. The next year, she went to a Colorado university. Her father came to drag her home. When she turned 18, she joined the Red Cross and was shipped off to Japan at the tail end of World War II. Her father never came to drag her home.

The man who became my grandfather had borrowed a bicycle and $7 from the Red Cross in Germany when the war ended. He bicycled down to Paris and never paid the Red Cross back. I don't know how long later, the army transferred him to Japan. When he saw the woman who became my grandmother in the Red Cross building, he decided it was time he give them their $7.

And that's how it happened. My grandmother traded in her oars and found her tide. It never took her back home, not really. She took off her pilgrim's hat and lived her sanctuary.

How are we so unlike our predecessors? Aren't their stories ours? Don't we belong to them in the same ways that they belong to us, all those lives that ran their courses and created our lives?

All their wind still puffs my sails. Someday, when I've been kicking around this place too long, I'll let it blow me away. I'll let it blow me way back to a home I never knew. I'm just waiting for the tide to change.

Maybe tomorrow I'll take down my sails and make myself a pair of wings. Maybe tomorrow I'll find myself an updraft and forget about the tide. Hapless idiots can find glory, after all, even if they never find sanctuary.

I have a dozen yellow roses to leave with my great-aunt Alice on my way. And hallelujah, I still have a great big Texas sky.