As I stepped into the museum today, the man at the register asked me where I was from, and it gave me pause.
Am I from New England, the beautiful Berkshires? I lived there for 25 years in our funky old house with wide-planked floors that tipped to one side. It’s where my husband found a 1865 penny in our garden. Where I swung open our front door, on our first winter to a white world. And at my insistence, my toddler daughter and I threw back our heads and howled into the night.
Or should I write down fun Northampton, where we moved after we sold our home after one day on the market? It’s where Tom and I walked to the library often. Where I took pleasure in the Writers’ Room, where writers wrote in silence round a long table for two years. Where they’re writing still.
Am I from San Miguel de Mexico, where we arrived 3 months ago, after selling or giving way most of our stuff? On our first day we walked into our rental past a wall of white-painted rocks, big as bread boxes, upstairs to our bedroom, where out our window, another wall stood bright with bougainvillea.
What about New York City? I seem to identity with New York, which lives a large imprint. Many of my New England friends escaped Manhattan too. And I lived there near there in my youth, then downtown in Tribeca when it was scruffy with painters, in my formative 20’s. It’s where I met my husband, a young artist, who courted me with a large framed print he walked to my loft, a mono-print of dancing ladders that sits in my daughter’s basement now, waiting.
After all, New York city is a place I’ll return to, along with the New England, once we move down in Mexico for good. So am I from there? After all, I can find my way around the grid, from the Canal Street subway to sister’s expansive Upper West apartment that’s been passed down through my family like an heirloom. Am I a perpetual ex-New Yorker?
I think not. After 10 seconds at the desk of the museum, paralyzed before the register in confusion, I sign Mexico, even though I’m not from there at all. Then I look into at husband’s subtle smile. He’s a man who attended 12 schools before college. That includes one in Lima, Peru, where they wore ties, and another near San Miguel de Allende in an old Hacienda, the town we’ll be moving to come spring.
For his whole life Tom’s been a Third Culture Kid, with roots in one country, The States, but identified early on with others, especially Mexico. He doesn’t really come from anywhere, but he’s still intact. And now, I guess I’m not from anywhere either. I could say I”m an ex-pat living in Mexico, but I’m not that yet, really. We’ll be traveling for 7 months and we’re not settled yet either.
I want to be a citizen of the world, but I’m not as worldly as all that. I could attach myself to where my things are, but we don’t have much left, and what we have sits in my daughter’s basement in Easthampton, Massachusetts, near the town of Northampton, where we only lived for two years. And that too is slowly being given away by my daughter, Emma, who lives with her beaux now and can’t keep everything for all the right reasons.
Besides, I’m not my stuff. But where am I from?
