Lately, I’ve been seeing the faces of my ancestors in strangers.

A jawline in the grocery store line.

A pair of eyes on the bus that feel like déjà vu with a pulse.

A woman laughing two tables over, her mouth moving exactly like my mother’s used to when joy caught her off guard.

It’s unsettling and tender all at once. Like the past is leaning forward, tapping me on the shoulder, whispering, We’re still here. Not as ghosts—nothing so dramatic—but as echoes wearing new skin. Bone memory. Blood remembering itself.

Maybe it’s age doing what age does: thinning the veil, sharpening the lens. Or maybe it’s grief and gratitude braiding together, making me more attentive to the human archive walking around in plain sight. Every face a palimpsest. Every stranger a possible chapter in a very old story.

I don’t think I’m imagining it. I think lineage has a long memory, and sometimes it recognizes itself before the mind catches up.

Maybe I’m becoming a root woman in my crone years. If this is my root woman era, then it’s not an ending. It’s a deepening. A return to something ancient and practical and holy. A season where I no longer reach upward for validation, but downward—for roots, for truth, for the steady wisdom that has been waiting in the dark all along.