Wrapping My Roots Around the Granite (State)

I have been waxing poetic about my life in New England for the past couple of weeks. I just can’t stop feeling as if this is where my roots have finally taken hold. I will even risk stating that my spirit has finally found the place where it can stretch and truly fly.

I know that a lot of this comes from feeling much better physically. I have had a wonderful summer filled with concerts, travels, time with family and friends, a wedding, and a wee one’s first birthday. How fun it is to watch people begin new lives and expand their own families! I moved to New Hampshire in 2005 to be closer to my grandchildren. At first I was a couple of hours away from them and now I am forty-five minutes away. I know that watching my own grandchildren grow into amazing human beings has been another gift of living in New Hampshire.

I spent many years feeling as if I didn’t have roots anywhere. I grew up on the shore of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin and loved it there. This is not the place to discuss why I did not return there to live so just know that ,in some ways, I was rootless for many years. I lived in Virginia for 26 years and spent a good part of my time wishing I could leave. I did not feel at home there. It served its purpose. I completed my formal education and made some of the best friends of my life while living there, but it just never felt like the place I was meant to be forever. For many years, I felt trapped and unhappy.

I know that we make our own happiness and I was able to find an attitude of gratefulness and happiness that sustained me. However, living in a large city has always felt very restrictive to me. When I was able to travel to the mountains I could feel my spirit expand. I could breathe. Living in a city felt like wearing clothes and shoes that were too tight.

Beginning the first week I was here, I found one of my greatest pleasures was to be able to just drive around and find places to hike and visit. When I lived in the Monadnock region I would get in my car and just drive, knowing that as long as I knew where the mountain was I was not lost. Mount Monadnock was a cardinal point in my life. I did not need to know where north or south were as long as I knew where the mountain was.

Even though I am no longer in the southwest corner of the state I find I can use other points (usually familiar mountains) to orient myself. I understand why a person would like a GPS in the city, but in the country I feel free to get misplaced so that I can find new places by means of synchronicity.

I am jealous of people who were born in New England. I don’t want to be a foster or adopted New Englander. I want to have it in my blood. I want to erase my “ers” and replace them with “ahs.” I want to say “wicked pissah” with the same intensity as someone who was born here. I don’t want to be a “flatlander” or “from away.” I want my roots to reach down into the soil of this state and wrap around the granite beneath. I don’t ever want to be away from fresh summer blueberries, maple syrup and cool autumn nights. I want to have the right to hate the Yankees and love the Red Sox as much as anyone born here.

I don’t want to erase my past, but I certainly would love to be considered a native New Englander. I would be willing to be dunked in the waters of the Merrimack or Saco Rivers if it meant I would be born again as a New Englander. That would be wicked cool.