You can do anything you put your mind to

There is a Brazilian man cutting the grass on the hill of my little utopia as I try not to look too put together with my new jade earings from my excursion to the city; it would seem out of place here. The smell of fresh cut grass reminds me of summers in rural Ohio where bikini's were the only acceptable wordrobe and I think of a well polished woman who used to don her bathing suit, stained green shoes, and spend hours mowing our grass. I used to call her mom. I hope she's proud of the choices I've made and the loves of my life. This moment is one of the few where I think nostagically about that time but not sadly. I hope my choices make her life mission complete and successful. I relish the memories this scent calls forward.
Those memories of fishing in bathing suits and the scent of grass remind me of bailing season, of sun burnt boys and men exhausted from days of hard labor, and I remember I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to have left that town in Eastern Ohio, I'm not supposed to draw maps of my country for Indian men and Italian women, I'm not supposed to compliment some one's English as I struggle to construct a sentence in Italian. I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE. I should be going to school at the local branch of Kent State, taking 6 years to finish my degree, I should be looking for houses with the neighbor boy who finally decided to put a little diamond on my finger, I should be content with summer vacations to the beach. But instead I've chosen rebellion. I've chosen a complete happiness -- I've experienced the world, and the whole world, and chosen my happiness; not from the choices presented before me but from the struggle and strife of making the whole world available to me. I've chosen a complete happiness because I know I can choose anything. I was the child it was dangerous to tell "you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it". They didn't know that to me it meant teaching children in Mexico at 14, or roaming around India at 19, or running off to Guatemala when I felt like my life was crashing in around me. They didn't know it meant a year in Italy after I finished with Latin honors at a university I "couldn't go to". They didn't know that my mind was so curious, devoid of the fear that keeps people tied to one place. No one knew what they were getting into. Doing anything I wanted to has led me around the world, taught me self reliance (or perhaps at least the ability to feign it convincingly), taught me to be open to those around me, to pick coffee beans, to dig foundations of houses, to learn new languages, trust in the kindness of strangers, and to truly decide what I want because for me anything is possible if I put my mind to it. What a dangerous phrase for children like me, but some part of me knows my mother is smiling if she knows any of this. She recused me from what the world would assume to be a life of impossibility and gave me life, a life so I could life it. Never telling me anything was off limits but simply telling me that if I truly want something I have to do everything in my power to get it. So here I am -- 22 university graduate, world traveler, journaler, want to be barissta, hiker, lover, translator, and most importantly content.