Life across places and between them: family, migration, landscape, memory, identity and the complicated work of making a home.
I like living in Åland. November would prefer I prove it. The sun has reduced its involvement, my children have demolished their Halloween candy, and the weather has ruled out sending them outside to burn it off. Thirteen years after leaving America, I still miss the shared anticipation of Thanksgiving. I am grateful for the life I’ve made here. I simply have questions about how much gratitude can reasonably be expected under these lighting conditions.
Thirteen years and an ocean separate me from Massachusetts, yet somewhere in its democracy there is still a place for my voice. I no longer live with the consequences of its elections, but I cannot separate myself from the history that made my vote possible. Between the women who fought to be heard and the country I have learned to call home from afar lies a question of citizenship, conscience, and belonging: what do we owe the places we have left, and what do we owe the people whose struggles made our choices possible?
Perhaps the strangest thing about making a home somewhere is how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. The landscape fades into the commute. People become their roles. Institutions become explanations for themselves. Then someone arrives with an unfamiliar accent, an impertinent question, or delight in something you had stopped noticing—and the world briefly returns in full colour. Such encounters aren’t always comfortable. They may restore something we love; they may change what we can bear to overlook. But I have never wanted belonging purchased at the price of seeing less.
On my forty-sixth birthday, I see that human life cannot be understood only from where the person is standing now. During the climb, I know the grain of the rock, the doubtful foothold, the salt in my eyes. Then something catches me. I lean back, and the years open into a landscape. Earlier selves, worlds I have come to carry, a life I once lacked the imagination to picture: each changes what the others mean. Where their views meet, I begin to recognise the life that could only be mine. Each of us carries a world assembled in an unrepeatable way, still widening, still coming into view.
Our relationship begins somewhere beyond the reach of my memory, in those first days when being loved was something other people would have to remember for me. Today, my grandmother turns ninety. Between us is the entirety of my life, nearly half of hers, and rather more geography than I would like.
