pedigree

christmas day around here is always spent among my family, a group made up mostly  of nordic-european mutts. we all just completed our ancestry.com tests, and there is nothing very spectacular in our backgrounds. a lot of scandinavians, a lot of germans, a lot of eastern europeans, all jumbled together. on a related note, my husband is reading a book about the history of the french language. one of the unexpected english words that comes from french is the word “pedigree,”  which is an adaptation of the french word “pied de grue” (pee-ay-duh-groo), which literally translates as “crane’s foot,” referring to the forking nature of the family tree of a royal or noble family. my pedigree would not look like the elegant three-toed crane’s foot, but rather something like the webbed feet of a duck or a coot. or maybe the random scattering of a rorschach test. i’ll take it that way.

two dried winter leaves