Yankee Go Home!

My flight from Florence to Glasgow is cancelled. 

Florence has flooded. The river tore a roaring current through the city, turning it as brown as the ancient stone bridges it threatened to bring down. Most of the main sites were shut due to the damage, so I had woven my way to the airport train between tremoring puddles and pairs of tourists wrapped up like cellophane-covered Easter eggs in cheap, plastic ponchos. I am headed home – to Glasgow.

People pause when I lay claim to Glasgow. Fair enough; I’ve been here hardly two years. But in that time I’ve grown fond of this city, which is not blessed by the warmer winds of the south and also not far enough north to earn the grim visage of cities of Scandinavia, where the buildings are drawn together like coats huddled against an icy wind. In Glasgow, poor weather wheels over the Atlantic, gathering momentum, until, uninterrupted by mountains, it unfurls, persistently and slowly, raining in thick, large beads the size of throat lozenges. 

At the Florence airport, the attendants instruct me in English – at 180 centimeters, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pale complexion, I don’t look Italian. I think, as the security officer returns my passport with a snide smile – ‘Ah, American?’ – that I also don’t feel particularly American. The American exchange students I had been drinking with a few days earlier had said as much.

‘We’re from the South – where are y’all from?’  

‘The South,’ I had replied, slipping into an exaggerated imitation of my hometown accent. 

‘You’re Southern? You’ve picked up a Scottish accent.’  

I haven’t, but I have lost the soft, slow, sound of my Virginian vowels. Southerners drop their words like they’re as hot and heavy as the humid summer air.

Very unlike this Italian airline representative, who announces in a staccato tambre that our flight to Amsterdam – where I am connecting to Glasgow – is rescheduled for the following day. 

I groan, my frustrated gaze catching that of the woman beside me, who unleashes a series of interrogations in Dutch.

Although I’ve never left Schiphol airport, one of the only places where I’m approached in the native language is the Netherlands. It’s the height – when the Dutch finally concede to my pleas of, ‘No Nederlands,’ they shake their heads in disbelief. 

This woman continues irately until my vacant expression lays plain that I am an impostor. She appears disappointed as they herd us onto buses back to arrivals. After the glass doors open, I dash for the queue to rebook flights, accidentally joining the priority lane between two Dutch businessmen who shoot out of their loafers at an alarmingly straight angle as they phone in a mess of English and Dutch that volleys, unintelligibly, over my head. 

I’m not ashamed of being American. I was raised on a farm, where the summers stank of cow manure, and the breezes carried the sound of flies up into the unending blue. The sky is so low in Glasgow that it seems its soft face might at any second be broken open by a tenement building. I have, over the course of two years here, had painful interactions with Americans who either are ashamed of their Americanness, or feign to be, in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with Scottish students. 

The attendant hands me my new boarding passes – all three of them. A plane to Rome, onward to Dublin, eight hours in the terminal, a plane to Glasgow, and two bus rides. And, I’ve lost my bus pass. Again.

On the flight to Rome, the flight attendant, her hair pulled back in a bun so severe it seems to draw her features with it, tells me to return my tray table to the upright position. In uninterrupted Italian. Stunned, I obey. 

In Rome, the security guard gestures for me to join the queue for Irish passports, and back in Glasgow, a patient elderly driver makes a misguided attempt to explain bus fares.

Perhaps this isn’t an issue, my lack of identity. But I’ve left behind a small, white Virginia farm house, where my mother makes me toast in the mornings and our old hound howls at the turn of a tap. I’ve left behind the grinding of horses’ teeth in the lawn, as they pulp the dew-slick grass, and the soft, pulling sound of their shoes in the spring mud. 

I’ve left my friends, their roommates, their drivers’ licenses, and their glorious, unabashed Americanness. And although I wouldn’t say it, and they wouldn’t say it, and we’d all insist that nothing has changed, there’s the persistent sting of a wound, large as the ocean I’ve willingly put between us. I didn’t go back last summer, and I don’t know when I’ll be back again. I didn’t have to leave. Worse yet, I don’t know why I did. 

The turn of two keys and I here I am, in the only city for which I’ve ever been homesick and also, the place I don’t have the authority to call home. Not Scottish, not American, and perhaps, not anything at all.