Inherited
WHEN WORDS ARE REPEATED and shared over the centuries, they have power. After all, they’ve stood the test of time. But what if we’ve inherited them in a way never intended?
“My son’s my son, till he hath got him a wife,
but my daughter’s my daughter all dayes of her life.”
~ John Ray’s A Collection of English Proverbs (1678)
It’s a collection. To be part of it, John Ray must have considered this proverb worthy, even popular. A small bite of spoken wisdom repeated often enough to be included.
I imagine a mother in a 16th-century English village, standing at her threshold and feeling heartbroken by the loss of her boy as he walks away from her, toward his new life.
She’s the first to speak these words quietly, under her breath. She knows there’s nothing more she can do or say. Another anonymous woman’s voice, accepting what she can’t change.
But her daughter sits behind her in the shadows, and she is listening.
So the words continue to live, traveling across time and space, surviving together for centuries.
Carved into culture. As if they’re true.
