Where I’m From

Editor’s Note: Trish was inspired by a poem “Where I’m From” written by George Ella Lyon, Kentucky’s poet laureate 2015-2016, which was part of the Kentucky Arts Council’s “Where I’m From” project.

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During some recent reading, I was struck by the option to write about “Where I’m From” based on George Ella Lyon’s poem. These are not geographical autobiographies of dates and zip codes, but how a person has been formed by the essence of place, in all its components of the ethereal and the concrete.

My life to date has been sectioned physically in nearly thirds. The first 25 years in southern California beach towns, the next twenty years in a suburb of Seattle, and the last 25 years here in southeast Minnesota.

My relationship to these places has been formed not only by the geographical and societal uniqueness of these three very different locales, but by my coming of age in California, my home-owning and career paths in metropolitan Seattle, and my farm experience and retirement here in Rochester. It has also been enhanced by my more than two years, cumulatively, in upstate New York. So, where am I from?

My California. Five generations deep, a Swedish great-great grandfather seeking his fortune in the Gold Rush. Subsequent Irish immigrant great-grandparents, along with their five youngest children, including my teenage grandmother, arriving in San Francisco a week before the 1906 earthquake, huddling in tents surrounded by their worldly possessions while the city burned around them. Ancestors wondered if maybe Norfolk, Virginia, hadn’t been so bad.

Later were my father and his sister, uprooted in their early teens after their mother’s death, to live with their aunties – the older children of their grandparents, who didn’t come to San Francisco, but instead went to work in the mills in central New York. They went from roller skating the hills in San Francisco to milking cows in snowstorms. The Navy brought my dad to San Diego (oh, so happily), after WWII, and my mom followed. I’m made of ocean beaches, palm trees, salty breezes, Mexican food, bougainvillea, Santa Ana winds, Sunday afternoons at Dodger Stadium, the comingling scents of beach fires, orange trees, and the sea, and finally progressive parents who fought McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and Governor Reagan in our very conservative town.

My Washington. The second third brought my husband Jerry and me to beautiful Seattle. It brought me the college life at the University of Washington, several rewarding jobs, a brand-new, four-bedroom house in suburban Kirkland for $67,000, the subsequent trials and joys of homeownership, so much baseball/football/soccer and theater, commuting, seasonal-affective disorder and midlife crises. I’m made of ferry rides, wind-swept northwestern beaches, salmon, wild blackberries, endless summer twilights, flannel shirts, rain, active volcanos, ashfall “forecasts” on the evening news, snow-capped mountains, Seahawks, Mariners, progressive politics, and “my people.” A sense of belonging to a culture and people that I’d never felt before.

My Minnesota. This most recent third brought us to southeast Minnesota to become organic vegetable farmers on a forty-acre farm outside Mazeppa. Financially traded straight across the board for the house in Kirkland. Farming was not financially feasible in the least, and hundred-year-old farmhouses on the frozen tundra are not for the faint of heart or for native Californians, but I wouldn’t trade the experience. The last quarter century brought me snow, more snow, two acres of lawn to mow, a dozen barn cats, bats in the belfry, hard work, the joy of growing spectacular vegetables, loyal customers at the farmer’s market, icy commutes to work in Rochester, and the overwhelming loss when my husband died. Subsequently were the move to Rochester, marriage to Gus, and finding this amazing church. I’m made of blazing sunsets across winter landscapes, red-winged blackbird song at dusk in the fields, errant sheep on the back deck, frozen well pumps on Christmas morning, wind chill, writing passive-aggressive haiku on January nights, sundogs on icy back road commutes, the deepest grief, the deepest companionship, and the deepest spiritual community.

Although I’ve never carried a New York driver’s license, there is also My New York. It is a heart space of my deepest being. It calls to me from my soul. It’s where my mom was born and raised and learned to cook Italian food from some nonna who was not of her English blood. It’s where my parents met and married, and where I spent part of a glorious summer when I was 17, as well as many subsequent cousin visits, and two months plus each year over the past decade at Chautauqua Institution. I’m made of Lake Erie, Radio City Music Hall, Central Park, Greenwich Village jazz clubs, Broadway musicals, Junior’s cheesecake, cousins, family cemeteries, beach sunsets, half moon cookies and chicken riggies and Utica greens, Irish festivals, and community connections that are celebrated and nurtured across the miles the other ten months of the year.

All of my places, as disparate as they can seem, have formed me. I’m so grateful to have sunk my roots deep into California, Washington, Minnesota, and New York. They’ve enriched my experiences, broadened my horizons, and taught me lessons that I couldn’t have learned if any of them had been omitted.

My story is the sum of all these precious parts.

Copyright © 2025 by Trish Braga