| Mikaela Nadeau |
All of us have a special heritage growing up, and it can evoke many things. For some it’s the fondness of memories spent doing family traditions. For others it is a rich cultural background that they celebrate amongst family for certain days or even in the comforts of their own home.
One of the wonderful things about embracing our cultural backgrounds and identities is finding such rich traditions that surround who our families were and acknowledging all that they had to sometimes give up when they came to America. From leaving homelands far different from that of the shores they came to, or embracing a language while forgoing their own, it’s become something we haven’t thought of.
Yet having family members that keep traditions or oral histories of our past has so much value in it that I find I am appreciating even more as I get older. I’m not talking about my own mixed baggage of family heritage which while interesting isn’t as fascinating as the family I married into.
I married into a vibrant family that has a culture so completely different from the one I was raised in that I had a hard time adjusting to many of the ways they interacted. I didn’t understand so much of how they operated, and I couldn’t pronounce some of the foods that they made at large family gatherings. It’s been almost six years since I’ve married into the family, and I’ve been blessed with family recipe books that have been collected from ancestors who came over from Lebanon.
With the connections that are made now, and the intersectionality of how we can exchange and learn from other cultures it’s opened doors for many to grow the produce their families used to have abundance of. Despite the limitations of our hardiness zone here in Maine, I really wanted to be able to grow the kousa squash that is used in a few of the Lebanese recipes found within my husband’s passed down family recipes.
I’m happy that my squash has flourished here in the soil I planted it in, and even more happy that I can share it around the table with my husband, son, and father-in-law who despite giving me a hard time (what in-law doesn’t) enjoys teaching me how to perfect the Lebanese dishes his family has made for generations.
