Not knowing "where I was from"

I have just reread Joan Didion's Where I Was From - giving it a "deep" read this time. It is a collection of related essays about Didion's personal history and the history of California, where she grew up. Reading it has made me realize how confusing my own answer would be to the question, if asked, of "Where are you from?"

I grew up, from age 3, in Florida.

We lived in Jacksonville (in a haunted house) and then Orlando and then, from my 5th birthday, in Melbourne. Very nearly all my childhood memories are of the beach and palm trees and flat roads and hot sun and ceiling fans and sweet ice tea and hush puppies and rocket ships. (They call it the Space Coast for a reason.)

Yet this is not really, truly, where I am from.

My father was born and raised in a solidly Catholic and most assuredly French Canadian town in Rhode Island and although he left at 17 he was so much a part of his home that he received the local newspaper for the rest of his life. When we go back to Woonsocket it is to hear his voice in the speech of everyone around us, to be surrounded by my father's people. To be surrounded by our people.

I have a maple leaf tattooed on my right wrist for my French Canadian heart which still, even with him 15 years gone, beats for my father.

My mother was raised in an air force family and she would tell you she was from everywhere and nowhere as most military families would say. But both of her parents were from the Bronx and their roots go back years there in Irish American households and families, in song and dance and laughter and a thousand kitchen conversations.

The shamrock on my left wrist is for my Irish soul; it's something you are born with and stays with you no matter where you live.

I have never been to the Bronx and only once to New York City. But most of my grandmother's family is still in New York State (all over including the city), and all of my genealogy research has involved NYC. My future may not be there but a large swath of my past most certainly is and it continues to be the center of learning who we are as a family and how we came to be Americans.

So you can see how this whole "where are you from" question is sort of confusing.

I do not have five generations in any one place; I have Florida and Rhode Island and Quebec or Florida and the Bronx and Ireland. My parents, remarkably, met and married in Madrid, Spain (my father was in the air force, my mother was there with her family as that was their latest station). The deep roots that Didion writes of are totally foreign to me and yet so much of her emotion for California, for exploring how the land formed who she became, resonated with me.

After the death of her mother (In California) she writes of going through her things:

I had my grandmother's watercolor framed and sent it to the next oldest of her three granddaughters, my cousin Brenda, in Sacramento.

I closed the box and put it in a closet.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

And that was it. My grandparents gave up the Bronx when they committed to a military life and my father left Woonsocket behind partly out of desperation to see some other part of the world. And I left Florida for Alaska because as much as I love the beach, I wanted to go away. (It's funny - I still don't know why I wanted to go away.) But when I consider who we are - who I am - the answers are all found in Rhode Island and New York. I am surrounded by pictures of those places, by accents, by the memories of food and traditions, by the locations of so many weddings and funerals, all in Woonsocket and the Bronx.

Everything about the family I have known and loved is in those two places. Dealing with what we left, with what we lost by leaving, means immersing myself in places where I actually never lived. Florida gives me no answers on that score and so I have to wonder, is that the place where I am from or somehow, some way, am I more from places where I never lived?