Nomadology
The next year I was off to Thailand as an exchange student, signing up for a year with American Field Service’s international high school program. I learned Thai language and dancing and even lived for a time in a small rice farming village. Later, at university I spent most of my time practicing Aikido and studying Japanese. When I graduated I began to wonder about my identity.
The first time I was in Israel, someone stopped me and asked if I was from Romania. We chatted, and of course, I learned how to pronounce “Jassy (the spelling my family used),”which in Romanian is spelled "Iași" the town where I always thought and heard Helen (Florida Grandma) was born.
I met my future husband high on a hill overlooking the Sea of Gallilee on a Kibbutz in Israel. We picked apples and worked in the kitchen, we soon married and I then became for years, immersed in the art of raising a family.
Our lives were one of constant motion—moving many times for my husband’s computer consulting career-- from Canada, to Israel, to the US, back to Israel and finally landing in Canada to stay. Was this a remnant, a memory of a family feeling, of insecurity, of impermanence, an echo of previous generations?
Over the years during visits to my parents’ house occasionally I would pull out the photo album.
About ten years ago I started looking more closely at the photographs.
