Introductions
My name is Katarina, and this blog represents a goal of mine. But let's start with back story. I am, like most white Americans, of mixed European ancestry. Reach into my DNA, and you might pull out just about anything. But that's only half the story. It could be revisionist history, but I feel like I've always had the surest sense of my German roots. My mom grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, and remembers as a child using bits of Germanic dialect that have since dropped out of her vocabulary. And my great-grandmother started speaking German (which no one knew she knew) as her dementia set in. Most importantly, though, I took German in school, and then took the chance to be an exchange student in Germany. Since then I've identified as German-American, with a few other (equally wonderful) things thrown in. And then I fell into the local German-American Society. They had folk dancing, something I always thought ...