distance, a knowing and a not-knowing

I'm obsessed with subtle expressions and realizing that so much can be translated even without features, in the spaces around them, the chin, cheeks and hollow of the cheeks, the forehead. I'm looking at my great-grandmother. I know one of her stories. She sailed to America at the turn of the twentieth century, only to return with her dying husband, bury him according to his wishes in the homeland, the current CZ, and find herself pregnant with my grandmother, in that order. My grandmother never met or had any photos of her father, but when asked was told to find him in the mirror.

the x's and arrows are my grandmother's

am carving them with her nail-grooming set