‘HOUSE IN DONEGAL’/gunther
June 24, 2019
By Arthur H. Gunther III
(also on Facebook)
There is your ancestry, whether you visit it, know it, appreciate it or not. It is in your DNA, in your features, perhaps in mannerisms, speech, beliefs. Ancestry may affect the genes in the way you are gifted with this ability or that.
You may never meet your ancestry by visiting a country, seeing, tasting its flavor. You may not have the means, or the interest or the ability to travel.
Yet be assured that who you are has a foot in the past somewhere. You may not know the language of your ancestors nor their ways, but in the same journey in which all modern humans probably are descended from the Africa of 2,000 generations ago, we each have reference points on the long trip.
Somewhere else, separate from your life as you know it, is an ancestor’s village — a house there — and you have a key to its door. Your own key.
The writer is a retired newspaperman. ahgunther@yahoo.com