The winter following my birth was a bitter one. We were still living in Greece at the time, in a house with icy stone floors and shivering occupants. My mother, feeling something had to be done to keep "the baby" warm, bought a space heater for my nursery- and, as my room had become the hottest in the house, moved the rest of the family in to sleep on a flokati on my floor. Until the cold snap passed, my mother, father, and sister slept all in a tangle on this sheepskin rug. Having shared flokatia with my family (when relatives crowded the house, evicting us kids from our beds to, as we gleefully called it, "make nest") I can attest that the worst of this arrangement would've been my father's snoring. Flokatia, hand-woven in the mountains of Greece, are surprisingly cozy! So cozy, in fact, that it wasn't until after my mom lifted the rug to shake it out that she realized she had been sleeping for weeks atop a clementine. She refers to herself since as "The Reverse Princess and the Pea" with a note of pride in her voice I find as endearing as inexplicable. I couldn't help but think of that winter when I awoke on the flokati in the bare room of my first NYC apartment. It was the morning after I had moved. Light was spilling in from windows I had yet to curtain. Alone on the rug, I felt as surrounded by family as ever. Scattered as we were, it made me smile to think that there was a time, a cold winter, in which we had been only inches apart from one another on the flokati. 

– Alexia

Relationship:  Im/migrant who arrived as a child Im/migrant who arrived as a child