They belong here like those who came before us

They belong here like those who came before us
                        

As far as I ever knew, I was a raised-in-the-Mennonite-church Berlin girl. Not Berlin, Germany, though I’d proudly claim that country as heritage should anyone ask. The surname Sundheimer stood out in a crowd, and I’d pronounce the syllables plainly if anyone stumbled: SUND-HEI-MER

Our area here in Holmes County is a proud mix of Swiss, German and even French – maybe more. Descendants of peoples who sought better lives for themselves and their families when they boarded a boat for a new world.

Far, far back they didn’t really know what this new land held. No one knew they were coming, they simply arrived, a bag filled with precious few belongings on their back, having fled religious persecution, world wars or just a dream for more.

I ponder the names of my classmates in school, most of them names as familiar as reading a sports roster when “Berlin Hiland” was playing in any given tournament: Miller, Yoder, Schlabach or Troyer.

We were a pool of small expectant faces sitting at small desks with big, chunky pencils ready to write our names on small, lined sheets of green paper. Concentrating, the lines on those speckled green sheets cradled our efforts in between them, wobbly squiggles that when done, resembled our given names.

My name was Melissa Kay Sundheimer, but to everyone I was Missy.

We were our names and our names were us: strong bodies making us who we were that ran the playground or diamond at Berlin Elementary School, our names on the tip of each other’s tongues.

The faces were as familiar to me as family, all of us mostly from the same area, running the same territory and feeling the freedom of that in the richest sense our small frames would allow. We never questioned that we belonged.

Miller, Yoder, Schlabach, Gingerich, Troyer, Hostetler.

Our heritage was something drilled down inside us. We were to respect it, cherish it, and nurture it in every way we could. I attended school with Amish kids, as normal as breathing, and heard Pennsylvania Dutch spoken in my ears from the time I was a baby.

Our cultural past was cradled here, revered, and stories about the countries we descended from – and the hardships endured there and the reasons for leaving – were softly told over years and years of settling here; making here a home. Enough, so, that even though the stories remained, the sharpness of the whys began to disappear.

The sting of leaving another country melded into the one we’d claimed as our own, until all that remained was a string of long-ago events that no longer cut us with their sorrow, their joy. Until we could no longer understand why anyone would leave a country to seek more.

My last name was SUND-HEI-MER growing up. No one ever told me to “go back where I came from” if we disagreed, or fought, or I did something my way. This was my home, where I was born, the town my parents brought me home to.

This was where I belonged, just like it belonged to the people attached to me by a long thread – those from Germany and Switzerland and France – who came here to make this place their own. My husband belongs here. My children belong here.

My last name is now HE-RRE-RA. I’ve traded my maiden German surname for the beloved Mexican surname of my husband. Someone who sought more and scratched for everything, yet still heard those burning words, and met them with fiery rebuke. Words repeated now from the loftiest in this land.

If I could, I’d put soft cotton pads in the ears of the children that hear these words – all children born here or not – because I couldn’t save my own from the sting of it. I’d pad their little ears so the words of those that should be protecting them can’t filter through.

That they could learn to write their names in the absence of malice, squiggly lines forming the letters that spell out who they are. An identity unmarred, their belonging not questioned, born here or across a line in the desert or across the sea. Like those who came before us.


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