My journey to Germany started back in 1959, when a young man named Werner, my father, crossed the Atlantic on a two-week journey heading the other way to Canada. He was looking for a new opportunity, a second chance to start over after a horrific childhood that no one should have to endure.

Born in 1940 in Magdeburg, he lost his father and several uncles to World War II. He was placed in an orphanage, one of many he grew up in over the next seven years, before being reunited with his mother and remaining siblings. He had lost a brother during the war, and another who was adopted shortly after birth. He was 12 when he came back but he wasn't the same boy who had walked into that orphanage at age five. The system didn't fit him. At 14 he joined the merchant marines, and in the off season he worked a shoe factory apprenticeship, taught himself to paint, and sold his art to local bars for drinks, food, and the chance to hang out with American GIs around Pirmasens near Saarbrücken. On one very special occasion, for an owner he had painted for, he was invited to watch Elvis perform at a private club in Frankfurt and even got some records autographed. Those same records he would carry 6,500 kilometres across the ocean with one suitcase and twenty dollars, and they were stolen from him the same night he arrived in Montreal.

The next day he was processed, given landed immigrant status, and told to hand over his German passport because in 1960 you couldn't be both. Leaving Germany at the height of Cold War uncertainty, he couldn't face war again. He boarded a train to Winnipeg. Before the weekend was over he had a place to live, a job as a typesetter at a German newspaper, and a five-kilometre walk each way to work. He learned to assimilate, to embrace the culture, the language, the Canadian way of life, but he never forgot to share every German tradition he grew up with with his own children.

I was born blind in 1972, after my mother contracted Congenital Rubella Syndrome, German Measles, while she was pregnant with me. My blindness wasn't discovered until after my first birthday. In 1975 I visited Germany for the first time, and unknowingly, the one and only time I would ever meet my Oma.

I lived off my father's stories, and the short two or three words I could say to her. I always wanted to learn German, but it was important to my father that he spoke English in the country that welcomed him, and my mother only spoke English. My opportunity to learn German came 63 years later when I enrolled in German language classes at the University of Manitoba in 2023. Then in 2024, at the age of 52, the opportunity came to experience Germany on an exchange semester that has turned into a journey to learn, live, and love in the country my father still calls his homeland.

The German government won't give my father's daughter citizenship through descent. So instead of arguing or expressing my anger and frustration, I saw it as another opportunity to find a solution, but this time I have technology on my side that I didn't have in the 1990s. I was always ready. Technology wasn't.

When I think today about what AI does for me, I think back to one of my father's paintings that I love so much. It was a painting he made of a rainy night in Berlin. Plenty of abstracts, vibrant colours, exceptional detail, with glowing street lights and the reflections in the puddles falling at the precise angles that they should. Some may call it abstract. I say it is the way I live in my head: vibrant, full of colour, and full of appreciation for capturing those precious moments.

It used to be photos. Now my art is words. And instead of writing words I can no longer see, I use my voice. AI is my ears. When I hear it back I draft, I edit, I synthesize. I don't have to be perfect. AI is my thesaurus, the same one that used to live in my backpack for the better part of my school years, only now it is in my hands. I used to write until I couldn't read my words anymore. You could call it a thirty-year writer's block.

Some women as lucky as me, married for thirty years, parade around in fancy furs and jewellery, and that is wonderful if that is what you want. For me, my husband Jeff introduced me to my futuristic pen: a voice recorder and an AI, and the instruction to put my thoughts down, use my voice, and create. Just like I had done before with photography. Jeff was working through commercial photography school and I would offer my feedback, and out of a combination of frustration and love he said: if you think I am doing it wrong, do it yourself. He came home with a camera for me. After Jeff's graduation we were an unstoppable team. We opened our photography company together and it gave me the opportunity to capture my favourite image, Fortuitous Twilight.

Life is an opportunity to learn, grow, and get lost in your dreams.

When my semester in the East ended I wasn't ready to go home. I found a university and a city that would accept me, and I am living my dream as I work towards German citizenship with my husband Jeff and our larger than life, blue-eyed Border Collie and Sheepdog, Käpt'N. Living in Kleve and drawing from the tenacity of my ancestor Anne of Kleve, I navigate every challenge and manage to figuratively keep my head.

This time I came with two suitcases. And Heino, Freddy Quinn, and Kraftwerk on my playlist.