I’ve inherited my mother’s wrinkles—
creased cheeks and puckered upper lip—
that visited uninvited one morning
in the bathroom mirror and have settled in.

The word wrinkle itself is old—
as old our language gets—a back formation
of the Old English word gewrinclod,

meaning the “winding or twisting
of a ditch”— its perfective prefix,
ge, yoking it to the more metaphorical
and older German—

my mother’s family
old Germans, too, solidly Saxon
before Grandpa’s father moved
to Berlin to lay brick for
the booming nineteenth-century city

then making the long voyage
to the New World by train and boat,
another train and horse to the Northwoods

and a farm in a land with short
growing seasons and long winters
and glorious autumns,

this displacement a wrinkle in the family
tapestry, our clan’s thread like a winding ditch,
gewrinclodding,

as when Mother made sauerkraut
without a recipe, folding salt with garden-grown
cabbages in a dishpan, tasting each batch,
adding ingredients as needed
before hand-packing each mason jar.

Though our mouths have lost the native tongue,
they’ve kept the pleasure of a taste
strong and strange and comforting,
like that aging face
now in the mirror.