serendipity

I come from the steppes of Russia. Ambivalent alliances, we were Germans transplanted in the black deep soils of Russia. Our family fled back to Germany under duress, when my grandmother could no longer conceal loyalties. “Stalin will send us to Siberia, we cannot stay.”

Autumn, Nineteen hundred and forty three, my mother was ten years old. Her small soul yearned back towards her father, an agronomist, whom she would never see again. Her will was already tilting towards America, ten years in the future.
My ancestors retreated west in covered wagons, protected by the German army.

I come from a father, whose family is still a secret sore. Unfit to serve, his back was held against him-he never experienced war, but from a distance. But an intimate war found him later in his own home. My father is a man who watched and listened. A man who went to college on the G-I Bill, he was the first of his family to become an engineer.

I come from fear in my mother’s breastmilk, from something following nothing-- that became me. I come from tears that hold every story worth telling and I’ll tell them all to everyone who will listen.

I come from gladness at a brother born in my tenth year from something coming out of me to give to him that in my wildest dreams I never knew I had. I come from mending mirrors so that the images are true and irrevocable.