For as long as I can remember the pale steel kettle has been adorning our gas stovetop. In every house we have lived in, the kettle has followed us. Video tapes of my first birthdays show this very tea kettle lying in the background on top of a marble kitchen counter with little children and parents running and playing in the foreground. While I do not know whether the kettle outlives me it has followed me from home to home all the way to the apartment that we live in today. I was born and lived the first few years of my life in Germany. After my parents divorced my mother and I moved to Greece. As time went on I started losing my German roots and my ability to speak the language. The one thing that I had kept from Germany was the tea kettle I had grown up with. After my completing primary school my mother and I moved to New York City. The reason behind our migration were rooted deeply into my mother’s dreams of living in this city, but the deciding factor was all the opportunities that I would have studying here. If I had stayed in Greece, I would have been forced to pick a career as early as the eleventh grade. I was around the age of thirteen when we finally rented out our first apartment in Manhattan. As we were packing our things to depart, I snuck the teapot into my luggage and carried it with me. While my mother was annoyed at me at first for not telling her that I had taken it, she understood that it was important to me, since it reminded me of my childhood in Berlin.

– Alexandros Achilleas Gloor

Relationship:  Im/migrant Im/migrant