Eyes on the Past 3/12/2023

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

I asked my daughter what I should write about this week.  Her very humble suggestion was for me to write about her.  I am not totally opposed to this.  I questioned her further about what specifically I should write about and she said I should just tell about her day at school.  Well the thing is I am not with her to observe and know all there is to know about her day at school and I told her as much. She seemed to find this a paltry excuse and went on about her business.  So I thought about how I could write about her somewhat in more of an indirect manner without actually being able to shadow her over the course of her busy first grade schedule.  I thought about this as we were traveling on my way home.  How could I talk about my daughter and my family in a way that wasn’t something I’d done a million times before or something that was agonizingly tedious to the reader?  What follows is what I came up with. Wish me luck.

I was hoping my daughter would be fortunate enough to inherit the Whitt eyes. Whitt is my mother’s maiden name, and her family has a frequent occurrence of some truly impressive eyes. They are very often some shade of blue as are my mother’s which are a lovely medium-to light blue. I was hoping that she would have the striking ice blue color that my mother told me about her uncle having.  In fact, a large number of her family has blue eyes in all the hues you can imagine, and all are beautiful. My mothers are one of my favorite shades as a matter of fact and I would have been thrilled if my daughter had gotten them.  My own eyes are, well, if I am honest I really don’t know what color mine are. They are definitely pale. Sometimes they think they lean toward the blue. Then sometimes they seem far greener. Then are other occasions where it almost appears as if they are the subject of a black and white photograph and are grey. They look almost completely absent of color at these times.  I used to not like the color of my eyes.  They just weren’t colorful enough for me I suppose but I like them now. And I have digressed, as I do.

My daughter’s eyes seem to have turned out to be a combination of mine and my husbands. They fall into some form of blue/grey category similar to mine but hers are darker and deeper.  Her father has hazel eyes. His are something of a grey green but right around the pupil is a ring of gold.  They are not your average eye.  My daughter has the darkness of his eyes and the coloring of my eyes.  They are large and blueish but a shade far darker than mine.  We are definitely related if the eye comparison ever comes up.

I had already had this done but, we recently went so far as to have my husband’s DNA tested for our ancestry. Interestingly enough, we both have the exact same 23 percentage of Scottish. He, oddly enough for your average Caucasian southern fellow, doesn’t seem to have a stitch of Irish in him. I have less than I expected. We both have a fair amount of Scandinavian and Norwegian in us which likely explains the regular occurrence of blonde hair and perhaps even blue eyes. Both sides of my family have the occasional red head thrown in for good measure, back to Scotland and my little bit of Ireland I suppose.

Speaking of heritage, my husband and I have a formal event to attend next month.  He has purchased a full formal kilt ensemble to wear. I am, if I’m honest, quite excited. He looks made for a kilt. I should have known about his Scottish heritage the moment I saw him in the attire because it looks like it was made for him. Well, I mean it was custom made so it was, technically, made for him but it looks like an outfit he was made to wear.  Though it is a more unique ensemble for a man to wear he looks terribly natural in it.  I figured he would look good in it, but I was thoroughly unaware of just how good he looked in it.  It’s probably cheesy of me to be so complimentary on the appearance of my own husband but, I am ok with claiming that title. I do like cheese so, why not.

Maybe this also explains why I love the Appalachian Mountains so much. It is said that the Celtic people who came to North America settled in that area because it often reminded them of home.  And maybe it is assuming too much about some sort of ancestral sense of home, but I do feel at home there which has always been inexplicable since I’ve never lived there, but maybe it is much deeper. Maybe it is in my blood.  Is that a silly idea?  Is that why from very early on seeing the rolling green hills dotted with bright rhododendron blooms seemed so familiar to me and why they call me back?

I, much like this blog clearly, am a bit of a mixed bag really. I have a lot of the Celtic peoples and some Nordic peoples in my heritage.  I have a massive amount of Britain as well as the main continent.  I even have the tiniest little bit of indigenous American in me. Maybe, now that I think of it, this is why my eyes can’t pick a color.  And I suppose my daughter being part me and part her father, this could explain the dark mystery of my daughter’s eyes.  They are full of ancestry and stories just waiting to be told. She’s already proven to be an apt storyteller so I can only wait with bated breath as to what her tale will tell.