Another Wonder That Time Works

So, what’s a transplant-Yankee girl like me doin’ in a place like this? Digging for roots, I guess you could call it.

Roots are those entwining things that, when we’re very young, we perceive as a threat to our independence. Bring on the bulldozers! The marshaling cry of youth. Gotta’ blow this pop stand.

And then stuff happens.

We fall in love. We get married. Build houses. Birth children.

We join the PTA. Drive carpool. Hold bake sales. Cry at graduations.

And then it’s back to Square One - only it’s the next generation doing the blowing and we’re the pop stand. Which leaves us time to think. Maybe too much. Maybe not enough.

And maybe by the time we have learned to appreciate the substance of our roots, and the subtle nourishment they offer … maybe we’re not standing quite as tall or as straight as we might have done.

Just maybe we have chopped off one root too many.

“Meet me in Atlanta,” my old friend suggested. “Bring some walking shoes and we’ll traipse a few lanes of my misspent youth.”

Tempting … but I can’t do it, I thought to myself. Too much history there for me. Too many dogwoods and too much pine straw. Too many early morning walks beside Nancy Creek. Too many memories of a house that sheltered my young dreams. Too many beginnings. Too many endings. Too many pieces of me left behind. No, I decided, I won’t do this.

But I did. And I learned a lot. An awful lot. About a friend and about myself.

The afternoon is a little too warm for fall as we wind our way through a back road in the north Georgia hills. The familiar, sweet-potato-red clay dredges up the memory of a little boy with stained jeans and a big grin, proudly holding out an old sand pail full of tadpoles or crawdads or whatever happened to be the catch of the day, for his mom’s approval. A reminder of the creek that still runs behind the home that little boy and I once shared.

“Over there,” my friend says as we roll to a stop at the mailbox end of a country lane, “was my uncle’s place. Summers, I’d come up here to work on the farm. It was great.”

He points to a blue-shuttered dormer on the second floor. “That was my bedroom.”

I’m trying to imagine the city boy I knew all those years ago, driving a tractor, baling hay and sleeping under the eaves of that old white farmhouse on the hill. “Wasn’t it too hot up there?” I ask.

He grins, making it easy for me to spot the lean, young man who on Saturday mornings would swing up onto the back of his uncle’s wagon for a ride into Crabapple Corners for seed or fertilizer and maybe a cold drink on the store’s shady porch. He shakes his head.

No, I guess not. Sleep was pretty easy back then … back before any of us had lived long enough to guess at a reason why we shouldn’t sleep. Before we’d lost the hopefulness of our youth. Before we’d lived long enough to have buried too many of our dreams, along with failed marriages, a few good friends, maybe our parents, or, God help us, a child.

Roots, real roots, provide a whole lot more than a side trip into nostalgia. They remind us, I suspect, of our allotted mortal time and the importance of an anchor when troublesome winds threaten to land us on our fragile backsides.

And, delightfully, they give us something very special to share with a friend.

I’m glad I went.

xxxx