"Where are you from?" Part 2

The randomness of where we're born

Originally posted on my Tumblr blog in 2020

So, I have this very normal, very ordinary, very average life story of growing up in Ohio as a midwestern girl. It’s where I was born; it’s my experience, for the first 45 years of my life.

The problem with this life story is, it’s not entirely mine.

It is purely by chance I chose Ohio to be born in. I could just as easily have popped out while my birth mother was working in Toronto, or before she and her husband got to his parents’ place in Ohio, or even later, after they had moved south. I could have been premature and arrived while she was still living in Newfoundland. Yes, I made my debut in Ohio, and that’s where I stayed, while my mother moved on with what might have been my life, too, had a certain doctor in Warren, Ohio, not convinced her to give me to the nice young couple who couldn’t have any children of their own.

So, I might have been a Canadian citizen by law, rather than by desire. But what if Jerry, the unwitting sperm donor, hadn’t called Mum a liar and hung up on her? What if he had “made an honest woman of her,” as they used to say? By the time I was born, he was stationed in Michigan. I might have grown up a Michigander. Or, had Mum followed his military career to San Diego, I could have grown up a military brat, learning to surf at the ocean.

Where am I from?

I’ve told you where my legal self is from—where I physically existed. Now, let me tell you where my soul is from.

My soul is the child of cod-fishermen going back generations. My soul is a piece left from English families living along the channel in England, around Poole and Christchurch. My soul is carried from Ireland, from Wales, from Scotland. From Iceland. Before Iceland, perhaps Denmark or Norway. I’m an Anglo-Saxon and maybe even a Dane...maybe the descendant of a Celtic or Saxon slave and a Viking. The ancestry doesn’t go back far enough to tell.

My soul is a strong, fearless warrior, sometimes failed by her exterior layer but fiery nonetheless. When my soul sees injustice, she cries out and picks up her sword.

When she smells the sea, she is at peace.

A view from Camping Tadoussac (Tadoussac Campground) in Quebec. My photo, (c) 2022.

Among other Americans, she shrinks at the hate and the selfishness. Among Newfoundlanders, she hopes and she dreams and she breathes.

She gazes at the vast sky and allows herself to fly alongside crows, swallows, woodpeckers, gulls, geese, bald eagles. She gravitates to the nearest body of water and aches when she has to leave it.

The trees are her brothers and her sisters. The mountains and the hills, her shelter, her lookout point.

This is my son Julian on his first trip to Newfoundland in 2017.

Where am I from? I am from the sea. The shore. The hills and fields. The little villages.

In cities, I die. By the water, in the forest, under the wide sky, on a mountain or in a cornfield, I breathe.

Postscript, 2022:

I found the perfect fragrance to remind me of how the ocean smells as you near the southern coast of Labrador. It's Wood Sage and Sea Salt by Jo Malone. I now wear it every day.