I was socially distant before it was the socially responsible thing to do. Or be. So if the governor of the commonwealth wants me to hunker down on my little patch of land, I'm better suited than most to pass the time in solitude. Well, not quite solitude. I have a few chickens that need me, and I like feeling needed.

But I don't mind saying it: I could use a hug.

​When we get the all-clear to ease into whatever our new normal looks like, if my luck holds and I stay healthy, I'll be burning up some miles in my car traveling to see beloved faces in person. I'd like to end up in a floating vessel with some fair weather and fine company, and let it take me wherever I'm meant to go. 

​

On a consulting assignment in New Brunswick, Canada, in a conversation over dinner with my new clients, I made an offhand comment about a French-Canadian great-grandmother and how some of my ancestors migrated from Canada to Louisiana. “Your ancestors must have been driven out during the Acadian Expulsion,” they said. “That means you have Acadian blood!"

That conversation led to hours spent researching my ancestry and the discovery that my people were indeed among among the earliest settlers in Port Royal, in modern-day Nova Scotia, tracing back to a sea captain named Pierre Arsenault who is believed to have sailed from France in about 1671. 
 
My father glorified our Irish heritage, claiming that we were descended from the Irish King O’Laoghaire (“O’Leary”). I do love Ireland and recall, during my first visit there, feeling gobsmacked by déjà vu when I came upon a vista of horses grazing in a green field against a wild sea. These days, however, after nearly four years of regular travel to New Brunswick, I think of myself as a Lost Acadian, who found her way to Maritime Canada by pure dumb luck. 

Or was it?
 
We are bound to our ancestors by delicate strands of DNA. Might DNA also explain why I fell in love with the French language at the age of 12? Why, when I was planning my first trip to Europe, it had to be France? Or how I ended up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, working a project led by a woman with the last name Arsenault—my newly discovered distant cousin? 
 
Is there something in our DNA that pulls us toward the stories and places of our ancestors?