All mothers hope daughters inherit only the best legacies.

Byline: LETTER FROM HARRISBURG By Dorcas Smucker For The Register-Guard

Fall is the season of crane flies, skinny awkward insects that my 17-year-old daughter Emily describes as "a little bit like an overgrown mosquito and a little bit like a daddy-long-legs with wings."

The lights on the porch attract most of the crane flies around here, but a few slipped inside one evening, resting delicately on the kitchen walls. Emily, who hates bugs, couldn't leave them alone. She rolled up a newspaper and went to battle.

Watching her, I had a sudden memory of my mom, in recent summers, and my grandma, many years ago, marching around the kitchen with a flyswatter in hand and murderous determination in their eyes.

These were kindhearted women who crooned in German to newborn piglets and spoiled the cats, but they had no patience with flies in the kitchen. After she killed one, my grandma often told us, in her German dialect,"Every time you `schwat' a fly, seven more come to the funeral."

As I watched Emily stalk the crane flies I thought to myself, "OK, this will be the big test: If she leaps up on a chair to reach a crane fly, I will know for sure that she is officially carrying the torch of her grandma and great-grandma." Sure enough, Emily boosted herself onto a green stool in the corner and smacked a bug high on the wall, then jumped down, looking satisfied, and took off after the next one.

Seeing this remarkable similarity to Emily's foremothers made me wonder again, about the intricate threads that bind generations of women.

How much are we tied into family patterns without even knowing it, and how much power do we have to carry on the good and meaningful and to break free from the unhealthy and unhappy?

When Emily and her older sister Amy were little, we lived in a cabin in Canada and I heated water on the stove for their baths.

As I bathed them in the galvanized-tin bathtub, I imagined us as part of a long chain of mothers and daughters - my mom scrubbing me like this in the little house in Kalona, Iowa; Mom's mother washing her in a farmhouse in Indiana; and my great-grandma, "Mommie Schlabach," washing Grandma in a makeshift tub wherever their family had most recently moved.

And I wondered: Did each generation before me have the hopes for their daughters that I had for mine?

I come from a long line of strong, determined women. Deep in the Amish subculture, the ebbs and flows of the women's movement in the larger society completely passed them by.

They never got the message that housewives should be all dainty in lipstick and heels, or the later one that they should be liberated and find fulfillment through employment or education or positions of power.

Instead, these women raised large families and hoed their huge gardens and sold produce in town.

They hitched up the temperamental horse to the wagon and picked huckleberries in the back 40 all day and then came home to do a day's worth of housework in the evening.

They built closets in the bedrooms and sewed denim trousers for the men and chopped the chickens' heads off on butchering days.

And they seemed to love every minute of it.

"We wouldn't have had to work so hard," my Aunt Vina told me once, chuckling, "but I guess we used to think we were half horse."

I am in many ways as traditional as my great-grandmother. I like children, stories, cats, making something out of nothing, and growing a vegetable garden.

Somehow, though, I missed out on the endless energy of previous generations, and I envy them their stamina and courage.

I can think of only one area where I actually try to be different, and that is in the hidden thread of silence that connects these women. They had plenty to say on almost every subject, but there were times and situations when they should have spoken, and, for reasons I don't fully understand, did not.

My great-grandmother had a child at the age of 15, and I am told that she did not talk about this. In later generations, there was abuse that no one exposed and an unwillingness to ask for badly needed help or to talk about personal things or even to verbally express affection.

My mother, in her own way, was determined to be different.

When I was a child, she courageously told us what her mother had been unable to tell her - the things we needed to know when our bodies started changing.

While my great-grandmother's silence seems incomprehensible to me, and I am far more likely than my mom to call a friend when I have a bad day, it still has not been easy to find and speak the words for both affection and anger, to ask for help when I need it, to speak out, to realize that secrets lose their power when exposed to light.

For all the mistakes we and our mothers made, we keep believing that our daughters will somehow get it all right, that they will keep the healthy and humorous legacies in one hand while releasing the regrettable and sad with the other.

I see this in Jenny, my fearless, red-headed 8-year-old, who likes to climb and jump and play kickball with the boys. "It makes me feel tough when I'm all banged up," she told me the other day, proudly examining the bruises on her shins. Another day she announced, "It makes me feel so good when people cheer for me. Like when I'm playing soccer and Kyle says, `Go Jenny!'?"

Jenny's energy and determination come straight from her grandmothers, I'm convinced, and that makes me smile. But what really makes me happy is to see how easily she identifies both her feelings and the words to express them, freely and confidently.

I am immensely proud of my daughters and wish only good things for them.

Realistically, though, I know that they will make their own choices and their own mistakes. But when I see them roll up a newspaper and stalk through the kitchen with a determined glint in their eyes, I am confident of this: They come from good stock, and it would take an awful lot to defeat them.

Dorcas Smucker is a homemaker and mother of six. She can be reached at letterfrom?[e-mail].