We pull up our roots

And our confidence withers. Whose idea was this, anyway?

By Kate Convissor

Feb 1, 2001 | It was easy to talk about selling everything and going on the road. The plan had romance. It had adventure and derring-do. It stirred our stodgy midlife souls and suited the adolescent restlessness of our two youngest children. But the doing of it, now that was a different story. Its execution required the physical stamina of a draft horse and the emotional endurance of flint. It demanded more of us than we had ever anticipated.

Far beyond practicalities that were numbing in their complexity -- How would we pay for the trip and manage our money on the road? How would we keep in touch with aging parents and older children? -- this decision required that we leave behind people and things that are dear to us without knowing whether we would ever gain as much as we were losing.

First, we sold our cottage on its oak-clad hill with the lake nestling silently below -- a blue drop of leftover glacial ice in a lush green cup. Loons nest there, and it is where our children learned to swim. Then we sold our house, the stately 1880s-era farmhouse with hand-forged nails and horsehair plaster walls. It had enfolded all eight of us within its ample rooms and had weathered the rambunctious activity of toddlers and the manic energy of teenagers with a grandmother's benevolent grace. Its yard and the surrounding fields yielded asparagus, rhubarb, currants, cherries, red and black raspberries, blackberries and Concord grapes.

My husband, Craig, dismantled the shop he had enlarged four times over the years and in which he made handcrafted coffins, custom furniture, whimsical sculptures and something he calls "storyteller chairs." He was known in our village as "the coffin guy," and in broader circles as a respectable artist.

Finally, we sold everything else, keeping in mind the advice of William Morris: Own nothing "that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." That still covered a lot of ground, so we rented space in a friend's barn for the beautiful and useful things we could not part with.

In the end, our dog was one of them. Our border collie mutt had sat on our feet as a pup and wormed her way into our hearts with her easy, eager-to-please nature. After heated discussion and casting about for options, we decided to take her with us and deal with the consequences. We were already losing too much to part with her as well.

Then the goodbyes began, and that was the hardest of all.

We had lived in our Midwestern village for a decade. That is a genealogical eye blink by our village standards. Its librarian, for example, looks back over more than four generations. She calls herself a spinster, but she is neither old nor homely. She is, in fact, one of the most intelligent people I know. She is as passionate about obscure details of British history as she is about her beloved Green Bay Packers.

When I blunderingly told her of our plans to leave, she made a few "oh" sounds like something soft and small, and I became aware that this news distressed her and even made her a little angry. People with roots form attachments cautiously, but once formed, they are tenacious. In a village like ours, buffeted by waves of growth and change, deep roots retain the soil of its character and history. But they are fragile things, and each small uprooting shifts the communal bedrock.

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