Putting down Roots

By the time Andrew and I had been married two and a half years we’d already lived in four states. We’d rented seven different apartments and would have two more to go before we would buy a house around our ninth anniversary.

I kind of liked it—it was exciting to see new places, each area of the country had its own strengths and beauties and in all those moves I met great people while learning not to clog up life with lots of possessions that would just have to be boxed up and moved. But after nine years when we finally signed the papers on a house five minutes from where I’d grown up I remember how it felt to spend that first Thanksgiving Day in our own home and I thought that I might want to live there until I died.

We’ve been in that same house for nine more years and while we’ve considered moving once or twice (for about ten minutes) we love our house. It’s not fancy, it’s not cutting-edge but it has a nice floor plan and a great backyard. My roses have grown ten feet high on the trellis, the sun hits the front room in the morning and the back rooms in the evening and the raspberry bushes give me fifty-four jars of jam each fall (give or take). It’s not big but then I’ve never been one who likes to spend my hours vacuuming so that suits me just fine.

It all makes me think about how much we move. Not "we" as a family but "we" as a civilization. I suppose we’re circling back to our nomadic, tribal roots but it seems that no one stays put anymore. It used to be that people lived and died in the same town, knowing each family and homestead but now that’s the exception rather than the norm.

I don’t want to get all eulogistic here, moaning about how small towns are disappearing because I’m not one to say that everything was better in the good old days but all this moving around does change us. Moving is about change and sometimes too much change can be regressive. We're not close to neighbors, we don't form attachments as easily, we're unaffected by the currents of humanity around us ebbing in and out with each new job or assignment. We worry more about our privacy than we do our neighborhoods and we live as if we're camping--never mentally unpacking all the boxes or really getting too comfortable because we know we'll just be on the road again in a short while.

Only one of the six houses next to us have the same occupants as when we arrived here. If you ask my husband where he's from he'll pause for a minute then say, "Well, I was born in Utah, grew up in several states but the largest chunk of my childhood was spent in Colorado. So I guess that's where I'm from."

He's not unusual, in fact he's lived in Alaska and in our house longer than any other place in his life. Most people in Alaska are transplants, born and bred somewhere else then drawn north by the oil pipeline or the promise of a good place to raise their children and in many ways our state is more like a giant hotel than a hometown--a holding place for people to make their living and raise their kids before checking out to retire south where it's warm.

The farther along I get the less I appreciate an uprooting. At this point in my life I don’t want to find myself in a new house, getting around in a new town and trying to make a new set of friends. We have history here--I love going to a store and running into people I know, of knowing the other parents at my kids’ school, of knowing every single street in town and how to drive it in ice and snow or where to avoid the potholes.

I like having ski trails and salmon streams nearby and I love it that we can drive ten minutes and see oceans, mountains, whales or movie theaters depending on the direction. It’s not a perfect place but I’m used to it and it’s used to me and while I have thought about retiring someplace warm and sunny with beaches and bungalows deep down I also know that I do not want to start my life over, not at 40 nor at 60 nor at 80.

While I can appreciate that change can be good and moving around often can't be avoided I think we’ve gone too far in that direction. People don’t stay in the same job or house or marriage and I think that all that movement—instead of giving us freedom—just makes us unstable, shifting around like so much loose dust.

Dare I say it? Are we all just dust in the wind? (Or at least something like that. . . . )

But I guess the point is, I’d rather not be blown to a new place. And as much as I've fought in the past against living in Alaska forever, when it comes down to it I love knowing exactly where I'm from and where my home is.

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