This week’s prompt for 52 ancestors is Another Language.

My mom and her family moved around throughout the time she was growing up. My grandfather worked for Brown and Root as a cost engineer. Right before my mom started high school, they moved to Puerto Rico. There my mom attended a Catholic High School. As part of her education, she was required to take Spanish. She also took French for her foreign language requirement and took Latin as an elective. She became conversant in Spanish.

Fast forward about 20 years, my mom is now married to my dad and we are living in Belgium. She decided to enroll in a French class. She picked it up pretty well. It’s said that you speak your third language with the accent of the second language learned, but the teacher said she spoke French with a German accent.

Fast forward another 10 years, my mom is teaching youth at church. A couple of the kids were native Spanish speakers. She surprises one of them when she starts speaking Spanish. The teenage girl tells her she speaks Spanish with a Puerto Rican accent and the teenage boy responds, “duh. She lived in Puerto Rico.”

She can still converse in Spanish, un pocito.