From the beginning

"So, where are you from?"

It's an utterly innocuous question, a standard ice-breaker, a door to potential familiarity and friendship... but it gets me almost every single time.

Almost every single time, I stammer or stutter, trying to deliver the goods as succinctly as possible.

It seems misleading to answer, "Oh, all over... " because that makes my childhood sound far more exotic than it really was.

To my sister's and my disappointment, we weren't members of a carny family. Yes, our father was in the military, but by the time we came on the scene, he'd earned the luxury of staying in one place, which meant that we had no need for passports until our early twenties.

For two girls with wanderlust, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

So, no: there was no especially fascinating reason for our moving hither and yon. And really, it wasn't even all that hither or terribly far yon; for the most part, I grew up in only two states: Mississippi and Texas. But within those states, we danced a little jig.

Vicksburg to Jackson for a while, then Natchez. A side trip to unincorporated Mendenhall. An enormously abrupt change of pace, to the dusty Texas town of Midland. Back to Vicksburg: specifically, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it suburb of Bovina. And for me, at least, Austin.

Ultimately, I met and married a long tall Texan, which cemented, I believed, my citizenship in the Lone Star State. Of course, the Texan had actually been born in Philadelphia to a man from West Virginia and a woman from Georgia.

So I devised my own label: I was, I proudly proclaimed, a Texsippian.

That suited me just fine for some time. But then we moved from Houston to Chicago, and pretty soon, the Windy City felt like home. It was settled, then, once and for all: we were Chicagoan Texan expatriates.

My identity crisis sprang anew when we moved back to Texas, this time to Dallas. And, as I was reminded on our sojourn south last week, my self-imposed label should really be expanded to incorporate Florida, home of my birth, into the mix, too.

Thirty-eight years. In thirty-eight years, I've inhabited approximately eighteen dwellings in ten cities and four states. More than many, I like to imagine, with no small sense of pride, but fewer, I'm sure, than others.

And still I manage to stumble and trip over any sort of efficient explanation of where I'm from.

But that's never once stopped me from asking the question in kind.

So. Where are you from?