Maude

 I have definitely been going down a Scudder family rabbit hole lately, which may just be an attempt to give myself an excuse not to grade the small mountain of papers I'm plowing through. The other reason, which I was thinking about this morning, is that as we think about moving overseas there is some conscious or unconscious need to put a bow on the Scudder time in America.  If we leave we're not planning on coming back, which would be an uncomfortable end to a four hundred year experiment in the new world (not for all Scudders, obviously, but at least for this little sub-shoot of the family tree). Anyway, here's a picture of my Grandma Maude, my paternal grandmother, who I always felt I had more in common with that any other member of my family. This is a picture which must have been me in my mid- to late-20s and Maude, down in the old house on Mulberry Street in Rising Sun. I swiped it from a post that my cousin had left on my Factbook page (I was doing research to figure out the last time I was on FB, only to happily discover that it was almost two years ago).

We really were too similar: smart, snarky, gray hair (this is before mine went completely white - I now have her hair), and the end our respective health let us down.