Musings scribbled down on a train as I travelled South

I wondered, idly, what it was to look American: by the standards of the great mixing bowl. My mother had always said that I looked typically English with by big eyes and light brown hair- although currently bleached to a ruddish gingery frizz- but I was anything but. My genes, I knew, came from Prussia and Scotland and Ireland and Wales and maybe just a little bit of England and France. I looked Russian, and I looked German, and I bore, in my inheritance, a Jewish surname now covered up. My mother's nearest kin were either tall and thin or short and squat and my half-French (half-Irish? No one knew for sure anymore where the Devines had come from) was a true nutbrown English rose. I and my brother took after our father's side: wild hair, huge shoulders, large heads and deepset eyes- big, big, always big. A little European subrace all of our very own, big and heavy and built for the farm. He had a nose and half, though he was growing into it- our mother's length, our father's width, a hook of his own invention. My own was small and short and thick-rigged, shattered as a child and left to make a life of its own.
I had very large hands and short fingers, and a stubby thumb and my mother's curved middle fingers. Large feet and a heart face and a vaguely hour-glass like figure. I put my weight on my hipss and breasts and could eat like a horse and was in all ways large, even when underweight. And sometimes I thought I would go hunt for a man of similar genes, and sometimes I found myself leaning towards the thinner, more delicate end of the spectrum, and I supposed it was all just my body trying to make it all work out. And at the end of it I realised that I still didn't know what it was to look American, but that my body shape seemed to blend in far better in than mixing bowl than in Her Majesty's green and pleasant and slightly overweight land.