My dog Dashiell and I pass the building's sign each day and it has inspired me to think about my own watermarks -- the things of myself that I've left behind and will leave behind. Not the concrete things like the furniture, books and paintings that are sitting in a storage vault in California, but the impressions I've left/etched on people I've encountered through the years.
I come from a legacy of mothers who left their mark upon me, etching profound disturbances, carving hollows of loss. I was determined to be different, but there's something about wounding deep below the surface that's not easy to escape. I knew when I was nine that my mother and grandmother were not what I wanted to be, but the webs they wove caught me anyway.