Where do you hail from?

Living in the Midwestern US, hailing from England, the daughter of a Welsh father & a French mother, I am often asked, after I open my mouth and utter my first few sentences, “Where are you from?” I laugh, as I explain that no amount of years here will disguise my very English accent and that chapter of my origins.

Ironically as a child I never really felt very English. With frequent vacations to France to visit my grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins and friends, as well as the vineyards on the way to Besançon situated in the Franche-Compté region close to the Suisse border, I was very much French. Being bilingual and having family in both nations, I felt that I straddled the channel between these two cultures. I was neither one nor the other, a hybrid that was a quirk of nature in both places, a person of no real belonging.

There are certainly benefits to being of such international flavor, but there is also a price. A sense of not quite knowing where you ‘fit.’ Listening to the stories that open up of those I meet here in the US, a veritable melting pot of peoples, I am always intrigued by that desire to connect with our roots. That in the knowing of where we come from this can inform who we are, and we can have a reassurance of where we are situated in the lineage of our own story.

We are not singular, we were never meant to be alone, isolated or just ‘one.’ We were always meant to be in family, in lineage, in the organic growth of a line and cluster of people, relatives, family, the indescribable closeness of that bond. I love being able to honor those connections, those threads of identity. We are who we come from, we are identified by our roots, by the filaments of our family line.