Rediscovering My Heritage At Age 63

I’ve spent my downtime recently going through old photos that sparked memories of childhood, and I’ve also been dealing with a whole new identity crisis. I only knew my mother and her family when I was very young. I’m lucky in the fact I still communicate daily with one friend I grew up with, and we help each other to remember childhood events we have forgotten with age. What sparked this blog post was the recent loss of an uncle and the memories that re-emerged talking to distant relatives of days gone by. We’ve not been a close family by any stretch but we were a large one.  Imagine my surprise to learn my mother, her father, and her family were Italian but I was brought up being told I was of Hispanic origin which I also taught my children. The whole topic has left me in shock in all honesty. A bit ironic on a whim I used the word Nonna for my blog and now here I am.

My earliest memories are stamped with the smell of the ocean and the sound of city buses in South Portland, Maine. As a grade school kid, our neighborhood of old New England style homes and apartment buildings were our entire universe. There must have been a good dozen kids living on our street, and we were always spilling out into the yard days into the evening. We played epic, sprawling games of red rover and kick the can until the streetlights came on, signaling the inevitable end of the day and calling us reluctantly back inside along with our parents. If it wasn’t a school night we often were out after dark dodging car headlights.

We were fiercely independent youngsters, relying mostly on two wheels to get around. Riding bikes was less about transportation and more about freedom, we'd race down the sidewalks, dodging porch steps and people, charting our small, concrete urban world. One of our real adventures though, lay just beyond the houses in the old city train tracks. The trains and train yard, known as Rigby Yard, were forbidden territory, which only made our explorations more thrilling. We’d walk the rails, feeling the metallic vibration long before any real train arrived, believing we were pioneers charting hidden corners of the city by following those tracks. At the time one of the older teenage boys had a bad habit of jumping onto the back of the slower train cars and he managed to lose a couple toes in doing so. 

That era of urban exploration ended abruptly when my family dynamic changed and relocated inland to the Lakes region when I was a young teenager. It was a huge shift, swapping concrete sidewalks for pine forests and wide-open water. The biggest milestone in this new setting wasn't making new friends or schools initially, but getting my first real job. I started stocking shelves and bagging groceries at the local food store, a true rite of passage that felt incredibly adult at the time, giving me a taste of responsibility and my own spending money.

The country life quickly established its own rhythm, defined by the enormous lake and things to do that came with it. After work and on weekends, my friends and I spent our time exploring the shorelines or just sitting on the docks watching the sunsets paint the western sky. The quintessential lake experience was our swimming trips at a covered bridge nearby. We'd pack towels and snacks, hike through the woods, and spend hours jumping off the bridge into the deep water below. Maine’s coast shaped my childhood, but the lakes gave me my sense of self and adventure as I grew up.

Looking back, the rugged independence and quiet resilience I learned on those city tracks and by the cold lake water are what truly shaped me. Even now as an adult who has traveled, lived in bigger cities, and experienced entirely different landscapes, that sense of self reliance remains part of my foundation. There's a particular kind of peace found only in the smell of pine needles and damp earth that no other place can replicate. No matter where life takes me or how far I roam, crossing the iconic Piscataqua River Bridge into Maine will always be more than a memory, it is  the deepest part of my heart, the one constant place I truly call home.

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