That was decided when my father departed for a refugee camp near Rome, beginning the long journey that would take me from a small village in Poland to the Canadian north. I grew up in the Yukon Territory, for the most part, going from a Polish home to an English school and back again, growing up between Polish and mainstream western Canadian culture. I never did feel like I “fit” in the latter, but when I finally did make the trip back to my place of birth, I failed to find that sense of belonging I so desperately wanted there. That was my borderland of identity, negotiating between one culture and another. In Polish folklore, the borders are where witches dwell. Witches buried their spells “na granice,” on the borders. And the most powerful witch of all lives in the borderlands between the field and the forest, between the human world and something other: an old woman with wild hair and bony legs and iron teeth. She lives in a house perched atop chicken-feet, and she flies over the woods in an over-sized mortar.
