A Letter on Anchors and Roots
My Dearest Friend,
There is a quiet assumption, I think, that roots must grow down. That to be steady, to be grounded, to belong, one must remain. Home is imagined as something fixed, something inherited in geography. A place returned to. A place that holds you because it has always been there.
But that has never been the shape of our lives. We have learned, slowly and often without naming it, to carry what steadies us in a different way. Not in grand or ceremonial gestures, but in small, repeated choices that follow us from house to house. We recreate familiar rhythms in unfamiliar kitchens. We build gatherings again in new living rooms. We unpack the same traditions alongside our boxes and place them carefully into spaces that do not yet know us.
It is not that we do not feel the absence of a single place to call our own. We do. There are moments when it would be easier to have roots that grow deep into one piece of land. And yet, ours have learned to grow differently. They stretch wide instead of down. They take hold not in soil, but in what we repeat and return to.
We see it in the traditions carried forward, sometimes unchanged and sometimes reshaped with time. We see it in the rituals that mark our seasons, no matter the address. We see it in the way we gather people and make space for connection, again and again, even when every face at the table is new.
In that quiet repetition, something steady begins to take shape. These things do not stop the movement. They move with us. They offer familiarity in places that are still learning our names. They remind us, gently, that we are not starting from nothing each time. We are continuing something.
Over time, those anchors begin to do more than steady us. They begin to take root in others. Shared traditions are picked up, reshaped, and carried forward into lives that may have intersected with ours for only a season. What we bring does not remain only ours. It spreads. It grows. It lingers in ways we could never fully trace, leaving behind small echoes of belonging long after we have gone.
And so I find myself thinking often of what this will mean for the ones watching us build it. For Bun and Bean, who are growing up in a life where home does not stay in one place long enough to be named that way. What I hope they carry is not a longing for something fixed, but an understanding that home can be created. It can be returned to, even when the setting changes. It can be rebuilt again and again without losing its meaning. And roots do not have to be tied to land to be real.
There is, after all, another way to belong. It lives in what we return to. It travels with us. It allows us to be rooted even here.
The Lesson
Home is not always something we return to. It is something we recreate. In lives that are constantly moving, our traditions, rituals, and repeated ways of gathering become our anchors. They allow our roots to grow wide instead of deep.
To the Spouse Whose Roots Grow Wide
To the spouse who has stood in more living rooms than they can easily count, who has learned the shape of a place by how quickly it can be made to feel familiar, I know how quietly disorienting this life can be. There is a particular kind of ache that comes from never quite being able to say, without qualification, where you are from. Just as something begins to feel settled, it may be time to begin again.
And yet, there is a quiet strength in the way you have learned to live within that motion. You are not without roots. You have simply learned to grow them differently. In the traditions you keep, in the ways you gather people, in the rhythms you rebuild again and again, you have created something steady enough to remain with you, even as everything else changes.
If it sometimes feels as though you are unmoored, I hope you will look again at all that has remained. Notice what returns, even when the address does not. There is a continuity there, a quiet thread that belongs to you and to the life you have built. It does not depend on staying in one place to be real.
You are not without roots.
Yours have simply learned to grow in motion.
