This year, America celebrates 250 years.
Numbers like that are difficult to comprehend. They stretch beyond our own memories and even beyond the stories many families pass from one generation to the next. Two hundred and fifty years is long enough for ideas to be tested, traditions to take root, and entire ways of life to emerge.
For me, this anniversary carries a different meaning.
There was a time when America existed only in my imagination.
Growing up in Poland, America felt impossibly far away. Distance was certainly part of it, but what I remember most was the feeling that it belonged to another world altogether.
Like many children, I knew it mostly through stories. It was a place that appeared larger, newer, and somehow more open than anything I had experienced. The details were often fuzzy, but the impression remained.
What fascinated me was not wealth. It was a possibility.
The idea that a person’s future was not fully determined by where they began. The idea that someone could arrive from somewhere else, work hard, take risks, and build something meaningful. Even as a child, that possibility felt extraordinary.
Years later, I would find myself crossing the ocean and beginning a new chapter here.
Like many immigrants, I arrived carrying both excitement and uncertainty. There were things I had to learn, things I had to relearn, and many moments when the future seemed less clear than I had imagined. Building a life in a new country has a way of humbling a person. It teaches patience. It teaches resilience. It teaches you how often progress arrives in small, unremarkable steps rather than dramatic leaps.
Yet what I found here was something I had sensed all those years ago.
America did not hand me a business. It did not remove obstacles or guarantee success. What it offered was something more valuable: the opportunity to try. To risk failure. To learn through experience. To start over when necessary and continue moving forward.
Years later, those opportunities became 221BC.
The irony has never been lost on me. I came to America searching for a future and ended up building a company devoted to preserving very old traditions. Perhaps that is one of the things I appreciate most about this country.
America is often celebrated for its innovation, ambition, and constant pursuit of what comes next. Yet it has also been a place where people are free to preserve what came before them. Family recipes. Old skills. Traditional crafts. Ways of gathering around a table. Practices that might otherwise disappear if no one chose to carry them forward.
After all these years, the image that comes to mind is not a grand one. It is the life people build within a country—the traditions they pass down, the work they devote themselves to, and the relationships that give meaning to it all. Perhaps that is why I continue to feel grateful.
Grateful for the life my family has built here. Grateful for the people who have supported our work. And grateful that this remains a place where someone arriving with little more than hope and determination can still create something meaningful.
That possibility is what first captured my imagination as a child in Poland.
It is what brought me here.
And it is what I still admire today.
— Aneta
