Birds of a Feather

It’s Christmas, I’m sitting in the train to Germany. I look outside. Mountains, pastures, and heaps of snow fly past me as I gently yawn, a remnant of my early departure from Austria the same morning. I am on my way to my dad and his side of the family for a big reunion. My aunt and my two cousins are visiting from Canada - I haven’t seen them in at least 10 years. I think about the time before they made the big move across the pond: how close I was with my cousin back then, and I slightly chuckle thinking about all the times I played jokes on her younger brother. As the train brings me closer, I feel my shoulders tense up and my palms starting to sweat. Damn, I am more nervous than I thought. How much will they have changed? Is it going to be like the old days or are we gonna look into each other's faintly familiar faces, connecting over nothing more than our shared bloodline?

Fast forward three hours I am sitting at my grandma’s dinner table. It is full of food, good wine and dimly lit candles. I look across into my younger cousin's face and wonder when did the little boy I once knew grow to be an over two meters adult man. My other cousin still looks the same to me, despite all the years that lie between the present and our last meeting, to me she hasn’t changed a bit. Still, while the cutlery, the old tablecloths, the pictures on the wall and my grandma's jokes haven’t changed, everything else surely has. Instead of German, I hear French and English at the table. My grandma’s boyfriend from the US is chatting with my cousin in English while my aunt is silently discussing something in French with my other cousin. They all bear heavy accents in their once so flawless German, their defaults long ago switched to a language I myself only learned a couple years ago. They stumble over words, fill in missing phrases with English or French and seem all the more changed than their looks might infer. We talk about their life in Canada, my life in the Netherlands, my grandma’s life in the US and my dad’s life in Germany, the only one who stayed where our family’s roots are. When I talked about my family before I always just mention my one half being Austrian and the other half German, but in this trilingual mix of conversation at the table I realize, this has not been true for a long time.

We are like a flock of birds, once nestlings, now fully fledged, ripped apart by strong winds and heavy weather spread all over the planet. New flocks were found, the missing links that were left by separating long filled, some parts discarded, some carefully reserved. But still, although we might no longer be who we once were, we are still,  somehow, all birds of the same feather. Even though generations of our family had only German conversations at the very table we are sitting now, we are, in fact, no longer the same family. We evolved, broke free, and yet, somehow still found our way back, even though it might just have been for a little while. And in this wild mix of countries, languages and stories I still feel the connection we once had lingering around. It is not lost but rather waiting to be resurrected as I am positive no one ever really forgets the feeling of family. Birds fully-fledged and long gone still will always find their way back home, if only given the chance. So I unpack my rusty French, make an English joke and mumble a comment to my Grandma in German - if we were meant to be like this, we might as well embrace it. And one thing is for sure, it will never get boring with our trilingual family.