Putting Down Roots
I remember my mom drawing floor plans perched on the kitchen counter and sipping her 3pm coffee. She did this regularly, and I remember ogling and saying, " I want my room to be the one with the bay window!" I was nine years old. I didn't know what was going on, other than my mom loved to draw houses and we often played make-belief.
I also remember ugly-crying myself to sleep the day my parents announced that we were moving. To a new neighborhood. To a bigger house. To the room with the bay window.
In the mind of a nine year old, they might've as well have announced we were moving to Saturn. All I could see was the absence of hide-and-seek with the neighbors, water guns chases in the summer, playing house with those ugly NSync dolls that were missing a couple of fingers, racing in bikes down our dead-end street, playing Lego in the fountain in front of our house, the club house my grandfather had constructed for me in the backyard, and those kids that were always grounded in the last house.
Needless to say I got over it, right? And I spent ten years of my life putting down roots in the only place I can recall being truly "home" for me. I painted my walls yellow and bought books and heavy things you only buy when you know you're there to stay. I met a dog who spent about eight years wagging its tail behind my ass, my desk chair turned from bright green to brown, the parade of sleepovers was never ending, and I became a young woman who planned and chased and accomplished things.
I've moved a couple more times ever since. This time, however, on my own. I've been uprooted and replanted enough times to understand that home is truly not a place, its a feeling. Its an abatement to the core of our needs. An understanding that the only thing that truly matters is family, community, support, engagement and a hellagood many things you like to do because they make you happy. Regardless of where you are, it's who you're with, even if that whom is just you, you make do. I've started over from scratch, I've left my seeds, and I've moved a long. And I think of how silly we sometimes are on thinking that our reach ends where our roots lay, when we can extend much farther from that.
I can't say that I don't envy, sometimes, the comfort and predictability of becoming in only one place. Of remaining still and watching, instead, light cast different shadows on the room. I do wish, sometimes, I wasn't in pieces. That I hadn't lived my life in chapters separated by the bookmark of different houses, and studio apartments. But I've learned to love all those pieces. I figure there's something magical about returning to a place unchanged to find, instead, all the way you have changed.
It's funny how when you're young your life is not a series of events waiting to happen. There's no notion of "later". There's only now, now, now.
And then we grow up and we turn into a walking disaster in the brink, crew hanging out backstage, a nuclear bomb waiting to detonate. And life is just a series of tomorrows, an ephemeral idea waiting to be truly lived.
Nowadays I'm at least remembering to always leave a couple of seeds behind.