24 May 2026

 Today is Elaine's birthday, my maternal German grandmother. Born in Hamburg in 1902. I believe this was a pre-wedding portrait.

Which prompted me to find a photo of her mother, my great-grandmother, Friedl Müller of Kiel/Hamburg -

The physical resemblance between them is obvious, but I'm struck by both the similarities and differences in their facial expressions (and to a lesser extent but nonetheless interesting, dress). 

I also see the likeness between both of them and my mother, and ... me.

I said this about Elaine and Friedl in my eulogy at my mother's memorial two years ago ...

[Dorothy came from] "a matrilineage of exceptionally strong north German women. It was Dot's grandmother who as a very young woman, after suffering huge personal loss and tragedy, had the courage to travel alone by ship from Kiel on Germany's Baltic Sea all the way down to the tip of Africa to start a new life in the gold mines of the Transvaal. 

Later, Dot's mother [Elaine] raised her own children with the same resilience in tough circumstances of a husband fighting a war in far-flung parts of the world, constant moves of home in his subsequent career, and very little money.

When I came to know her, living by then in a remote, rural part of the Transkei, I found a granny who could shoot a black mamba in a tree at 20 paces, grow absolutely anything in any kind of soil, and wring a cockerel's neck with her bare hands (afterwards dissecting the cockerel very precisely to give me an anatomy lesson!). Such were Dot's genes."

Of course that is my matrilineage too. Including the forcefield that was my mother. I see traces, good and bad, from time to time of (what I think I know about) all these women in myself and my own geographical trajectories.

Just for today though, remembering Elaine, I'm choosing to think about how my pleasure in gardening very definitely comes from her.