Roots

Katie D.

March 15, 2009 - 7:45 PM

We are a nation of immigrants. Of migrants, even. I keep thinking about this basic fact of our young nation's history as I do work with international students, or during my work with the migrant community on the US/Mexican border. St. Patrick's Day is coming up, and I'm ready to celebrate like the proud Irish woman that I really am not. Isn't it interesting that we maintain these international ties just for the few times they come up as relevant? When I speak with students from China or Iraq many are confused when I mention that my last name is Irish. But Ireland isn't far behind my family history. If you're a "dominant culture" American, you're probably a recent transplant. Imagine living in a country your family had been a part of for more than five generations. It's just not the reality here.

I just claimed status as Irish, but really I'm something of a mutt. On my Dad's side I'm both a third-generation American (of Irish descent), and a Daughter of the American Revolution: here since Day One. My Mom's side seems to be a little bit more confused, or at least less well-documented, but includes Scandinavian (I can "Uff Da" with the best of them), and a vague history of some Native American roots as well.

It's interesting to stop and think about how these factors in our histories play out. Strange how I keep the Irish pride for St. Patty's Day, am proud of my DAR status but haven't paid to actually join the club, and keep having to check with my Mom about that side of the family's pedigree.

Does it matter or not? Hard to say.

The other part of this is the migrating issue. We Americans are movers. We move for school and for jobs, we move to marry and to just have a change of place. When I talk to my online tutoring students from Iraq (through the American English Institute), many of them are very surprised that I have chosen to live hundreds of miles away from my family and my home to go to school, and that my best reason for having removed myself from my community is that I "like Oregon." Some students react to that by telling me I'm brave, and some hide pity for a young woman so obviously away from her roots.

This is a poignant issue for me at the moment because of my Mom's side of the family. My "Uff Da" relatives, the Minnesota farmers. With Fargo accents and a history of corn and cows.

Some of my best childhood memories were back on my grandparent's farm. The old barn with musty straw where my sister and I would play, the huge old oak trees, and the rows of corn behind the barn that were always a little scary to the little girl I was. We would drive up to Minnesota every summer, driving through the Great American Bread Basket and counting cattle. Grandma and Grandpa's house was such an adventure: my suburban landscapes expanded outward to a farmhouse on a hillside, to chasing snakes in the grass and exploring the enigmatic tools in the old garage. There was a smell in the house like no place I have ever been. And the dirt in their garden was the darkest, most beautiful dirt my Colorado eyes had ever seen.

My Mom left Minnesota years ago. She was a first-generation college student, and then married my Dad and settled down in Colorado, not too far from where he had grown up. But I feel like I have roots still in Minnesota, like part of me claims it as home.

I talked to my grandma today. They've moved off the farm and into a townhouse in the nearby town of 1500 people that is more reasonable for an aging couple to manage. And, as happens all across the US, the older farming generation is not being replaced by young farming families. It's not an easy lifestyle, and not one facilitated by our country's fascination with mechanization and huge agribusiness.

The land is going to be sold and made into a subdivision. Sometime in the next month the Watertown Fire Department will be using the farmhouse as a practice site for new trainees. It's the practical thing for my grandparents to do, and a rational step toward retiring comfortably and leaving the farm. But the house I loved, the barn and the garage, they are all going to burn.

Rationality doesn't have any place in a lament for the loss of a childhood love. It's the same with my neighborhood back home in Colorado. It's not home, and not the kind of place I'd be interested in living in again. But still there's a connection to a place with so many memories: with old hide-and-go-seek spots, with dogs whose names I know and trees I used to climb.

I've packed up and left home, just like my Irish great-grandparents did. Just like my Revolutionary War ancestors did, and like my Mother did when she left her home. We are a nation of immigrants and of migrants. And, living that reality as I do, I find mostly a great feeling of freedom and possibility in that fact.

But there is also the remorse that comes from knowing you've left something you can never get back, and that some part of your past will cease to exist, burned and subdivided.

Strange sense of connection from a wandering girl like me. But we all come from somewhere, and my somewheres include Colorado suburbs, Minnesota farmland, and a stretched but strong love of Ireland and my far-away Irish roots.