Looking for Trace

What is that "something"?

After we lost Olivia, I’d often wander parts of our house trying to remember her in specific places. It seemed so odd to me that a person could inhabit a place for so long, make so many trips between the porch and the kitchen, the bedroom and bathroom, the living room and the front door and there be no sign of it? No worn groove or energy pattern that would mark their passage. Was there part of her, somewhere, she left behind? Something I could hold onto? 

As a kid hunting, we would call it looking for trace, carefully examining the landscape for hoof print or horn scrape, bent grass from bedding or pellets left behind after foraging. Finding trace was essential to finding game. 

As my wife and I drove around Houston recently, a list of addresses guiding us, both those images came to mind. I was “looking for trace” of my family of genetic origin, the one I’d only recently discovered through DNA testing and whatever else you wanna call it. Luck? Providence? Karma? Maybe just finding long lost trace. Whatever it was we were following it, from lots where original humble houses had been torn down to make room for McMansions, to towering public structures built by a great uncle through parks where old men once played as young kids. Sorting through the accumulation of strata by watching old home movies, remembered stories and landmarks shared in emails, and our own imaginations, we could tell we’d come across the trail, but not sure where it led. 

I’m still not sure. What am I hoping to find looking for trace of people who I know are already gone? Knowing that I won’t turn a corner after diligently searching and suddenly come face to face with them? I could fill the next paragraph with cliché about finding myself, putting pieces together, blah, blah, blah and sure there is some of that and it’s important in its own way. But when I say I don’t know, I mean I really don’t know. The older I get the more I walk this world with wonder, what am I looking for? What does it mean? 

I doubt my curiosity is unique. I’ve written in other places about how our understanding of where and who we come from in large measure shapes how we see and interpret the world. Our understanding of that is always changing as we get older and if not wiser, at least more experienced. But this feels more keen these days, not so much urgent as ripe. If you’ve ever sought to search for trace yourself you know it can be lost over time or washed away in a storm. So I’ll keep looking as long as there’s sign to find and maybe, hopefully, something, whatever that might be, will surprise me after all.