Three winters before I could call it home

I arrived in Jackson Heights in January with one suitcase and my mother's recipe notebook. The first winter, I cried at the bus stop on 73rd Street because the cold felt like a wall between me and everyone walking past. The second winter, the Bangladeshi auntie at the grocery taught me to line my boots with newspaper, and I taught her daughter long division. The third winter, a neighbor knocked to ask if I — me! — could translate at the school meeting. Walking home that night through the snow, I realized I wasn't translating between two worlds anymore. I was simply speaking. Both languages had become mine, and so had both places.