End of an H6 Haplogroup

Mesopotamia

3069 B.C.

At her family’s farm estate south of the Tigris River, Cunei wiped sweat from her brown eyes with her tanned muscular arms. The low sun signaled her to finish harvesting as she bent down and ran her hands through the green leafy vegetation for the day’s last time. Even weary, she liked the touch of its crisp cool feel. She enjoyed the textile kinetic energy of finding the base of the vegetable and breaking it from the stem. Each time she harvested a plant, the soft snapping noise caused a sense of success to well up inside her. She had sheparded these plants from seed to fruit, breaking her young body from the exertion and weathering her hands to look much older than her twenty years.

Lifting a coiled-constructed basket, she carried it the kilometer walk home and placed it in the last remaining space of their wagon - packed for tomorrow’s journey to market. For the second season, her bountiful harvest had provided them with much in the way of excess.

Crossing the hearth into the soft brown clay home, she noticed her father looked angry. Unable to stand due to an accident in a limestone mine years ago, he sat disabled in his cushioned chair.

“They will accuse you again of being short on the vegetable count,” his low voice seemed to growl at her. She locked eyes as if daring him to get up and confront her, knowing he couldn’t.

“Then you go, they don’t accuse men of shorting the counts.”

“None of us will go. They will come here.”

“No, if they come here, the price is half. Worked too hard to get half,” she said as she walked past him toward the kitchen hearth seeking a water jug for her parched throat. The smells of cooking soups should have eased her tightness and anger, but it didn’t. She wished he was wrong, but last season two merchants came and accused her counts of being wrong. He gave them a partial refund. Her counts hadn't been wrong.

Drinking and eating didn’t help her feel better, but as she thought about her dilemma an idea struck her. Walking behind their house, she found her younger sister making pottery out of clay and limestone. Is this idea arrogant? She asked herself. Perhaps.

With dying light, she sat cross-legged, measuring and matting a square of wet clay while her sister eyed her with a look of curiosity. Unlike the crisp feel of the vegetables, she didn’t like the feel of the soft wet clay. When her tablet was half dry, she took it to the wagon and counted through the baskets of produce. As she did, she used a straight stylus and pressed the count and symbols into the soft clay. Now she enjoyed the process, feeling the clay squish down under the pressures she applied with the stylus. Her physical efforts created the lines and symbols similar to the ones she had seen tax collectors use at their seasonal visit.

Showing Father her finished result, he looked hard at the tablet and back at his daughter. Nodding, she knew he would let her go to market and she knew no one would dispute what they had bought from her.

Monastery of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel

Mount Mar Elias, Syria

1212 A.D.

Lay Sister Berdesta, 139 generations descended from Cunei, sat cross-legged on the floor of her small stone room. Filtered by passing clouds, the light from her abbey window created faint patterns of alternating shade and brightness on the top of her thirty-year-old bowed head.

Twice her age, the Canoness stared down upon the woman’s dark hair with a disapproving look. The cool spring breeze from the window belied the seriousness and defiance of the moment.

“I want to see them all,” the Canoness said in a low tone, a tone of little effort, a tone of a woman accustomed to having her every word obeyed as if God Himself had spoke.

Berdesta twisted and pulled out a small stack of parchments from under her thin mattress. The Canoness shuffled through the papers. There were charcoal drawings of a baby, a toddler girl, a child of perhaps ten years, and a teenage girl. The latter shared Berdesta’s dark hair, dark eyes, and seemed shaded to have the same tan skin.

“Have you seen your baby since we took her from you?”

“Never, Canoness.”

“So, these are your imaginations, scratched out on these stolen parchments.”

“Refuse, Canoness, scraps discarded by the scribes. Charcoal from fires.”

“You enjoy this, torturing yourself so. You should forget her. Adoption was best for her, and for you.”

“I like the feeling of creating her on the page, to see her come to life. If that’s from the devil, then I’m a sinner, but is loving God’s creation a sin?” She asked and she stopped herself from saying more. She doubted the Canoness would understand how good it felt to draw on the page, to scrape the charcoal across the parchment, as if releasing from within her a bit of her pain.

“I’m removing you from garden duty.”

“No,” Berdesta dared to look up with her eyes ablaze like thick brown trunks burning in a forest fire, “please don’t. Farming connects me to my family.” The Canoness seemed to squelch an urge of her own, but her Mediterranean features transformed from a hardness to a look of almost empathy.

“You’ll now work for the scribes. There’s a technique with paints to illustrates the manuscripts. Come I will show you.”

1253 A.D.

The monk watched as two acolytes cleaned the dead woman’s small stone room. Besides the single bed, table, and chair, the room had perhaps 400 charcoal drawings on parchment scraps. All showed the same thing, the same imaginary woman, drawn at all ages of life. The deep thorough longing - never realized - to see her baby again, to know what became of her, to know if she had her own child, to know the feel of her embrace and the softness of her cool skin against her cheek.

“What do we do with these?” A teenage boy, the elder of the acolytes, asked with a revenant tone out of respect for the dead. He hadn't thought much of the old woman who had been blind the last two years. The monk shuffled through the hundreds of drawings while the boys waited. The monk selected the one he thought the best, a young woman in her twenties perhaps, beautiful, happy. That one, of the hundreds, he chose to preserve.

“Burn the rest,” he said with authority as he left the room to arrange a brief funeral.

Exhibition: “Woman in Charcoal, artist unknown, circa 13th century.”

London Museum of Art

1936 A.D.

Anna, age nineteen, twenty-five generations descended from Berdesta, stood mesmerized, staring unflinching at the charcoal drawing. An English man, tall with blonde hair and hawk-like features, in his twenties, walked up to her peripheral vision.

“The subject favors you. You could be sisters,” he whispered in a tone of reference he reserved for churches, libraries, and museums. She looked at him and held his stare. Then, she looked back at the seven-hundred-year-old faded drawing. She did resemble the subject, perhaps why she felt drawn to this work.

“I wonder why he chose charcoal for his medium,” she commented.

“Not much is known about the origins of this piece. The similarities in the canvas to the monastery bibles of the era leads to speculation that the artist was a monk.” They stood in silent admiration for the drawing, until the man turned toward her.

“Francis Howard,” he said as he offered her his hand. She took it.

“Anna.”

“My pleasure,” he said, holding her hand longer than he should. She didn’t let go either.

“Do you work here at the museum, Mr. Howard?” She asked, enjoying practicing his name and examining his blue eyes.

“I’m a doctoral student, writing a dissertation on ancient writing.”

“That sounds, dry,” she said with a smirk.

“Can I show some pieces? Maybe change your mind.”

“Such as?”

“There is a cuneiform piece upstairs that a merchant in Mesopotamia wrote as a receipt five thousand years ago. Imagine all those years ago, a man pressed symbols into limestone and here we are, all these years later, able to know the fruit of his farming labor.”

“A receipt sounds dry,” she smiled at him and turned her head down, “but, yes, I’d like to see it.”

Harlem, New York City

2021 A.D.

Frank Howard, sitting at his bamboo kitchen table in his small two-bedroom apartment, stared at a twenty-thousand-dollar check addressed to Sara Howard, his birth name, a name he hadn’t seen in writing in many years. A name he hadn’t used in even more years. He read the letter from his grandmother’s estate attorney. A second letter, faded yellow, encased in preserving plastic, lay beside the open Fed-Ex envelope.

“My grandmother passed,” he called out, softer than he intended.

“We saw her last month at Easter,” his husband exclaimed as he hurried into the room and grabbed Frank by the shoulders. “What happened?” The tall dark-skinned man asked with tenderness. His oversized features, a large nose and full lips, all softened as he touched the man he loved.

“Not her,” he said as he handed him the lawyer’s letter. Their adopted teenage daughter sulked in and surveyed the scene.

“What’s that?” Anna-Marie, a beautiful, but awkward Asian girl asked as she picked up the plastic encased letter and started reading it.

“It’s from World War Two. My grandparents wrote letters to each other while he served in the British army.”

After taking a selfie with the letter for TikTok, she read the letter again with care.

“His name was Francis, like yours? Is that why you picked the name Frank?”

“Yes, I loved him very much.”

“But I never met them,” she said looking up from the letter for the first time. Her dads exchanged a glance, before Frank answered her.

“No, he died before you were born, and she was,” he paused as her dads exchanged another glance, “old.”

“At least her lawyer apologizes for the check, but, apparently, she insisted it be made out that way,” Davie whispered as he squeezed Frank’s shoulder again.

They left Anna-Marie and went to their bedroom to continue their adult conversation. She read the withered yellow paper again. A love letter from ancient history - almost eighty years ago!

Her favorite passage she read more than a dozen times:

When this letter reaches you, know that I am reaching you. You are feeling the paper I felt, holding what I held. Do you smell vanilla? I sprayed my perfume you like.

She couldn’t imagine ever getting that same feeling from a text, an email, or a snap.

In her room, she opened her version of a junk drawer and dug out a small black leather notebook that had been an unused stocking stuffer two Christmases ago. She felt the paper, rubbing the quality against her fingertips. Sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor, she thought of her adopted great-grandmother. She tried to imagine what it felt to be in love with someone far away. As she began writing, she enjoyed the feel of scratching the ink across the page: I read a letter today.