The Women of My Bones

I was not raised with full stories. No family tree carved neatly in lines. No feast of names I could recite like scripture. But I was raised with something older—a knowing. The kind that rises in your chest before you have words for it. The kind that hums in your joints when the air turns cold. The kind that says, You come from fire iron and braided earth. You come from us.

These are the women of my bones—Appalachian and Indigenous—who never learned softness the way stories like to romanticize it. Their softness was a blade wrapped in prayer. A whisper over simmering stew. A child on one hip and a storm on the other. They did not break, even when the world told them to bend. They cursed under their breath, bled into their gardens, laughed like cracked mountains, and still sang songs into babies' ears. I am their daughter, though I may never know each of their names.

I carry their strength in the tilt of my jaw, in the ways I say no without explanation, in the long pauses where I listen, not for answers, but for echoes. They speak to me—not with clear histories or tidy timelines, but through instinct. Through the way my body refuses to quit. Through the way I stand alone and still feel surrounded. I do not need a full record to be the record. My blood remembers. My skin remembers. My spirit translates what the papers forgot.

They made do with little. They birthed and buried, gathered herbs in silence, trusted the wind, trusted their hands, trusted Jehovah when no man showed up with mercy. Some lived long; some did not. But all of them knew something about enduring—about holding on and letting go in the same breath. About making fire from nothing but damp sticks and holy stubbornness.

I do not walk alone. Every step I take forward, they take with me. I am not a girl lost from her people—I am the people continuing. I am the seed and the bloom. The bruise and the balm. And though I may never fully know their customs, their words, their griefs, I still honor them—because I still tell them. I write them into the earth, into paper, into my own bones. I am not their echo. I am their living.