Roots

In any given week I scarcely know what I will write about; all too often I rely on serendipity to lead the way. So it was this week. I had tasked myself with the challenge of pulling out two very large and nearly dead bushes that framed our house, knowing that it would be a long and arduous undertaking. Little did I know just how deep the roots of these shrubs pierced the earth, nor how stubborn they might be, holding on with a deathless grip.

The metaphor was lying there ripe for a post, although my aching back and arms paid the price. It reminded me of a widowed aunt from New England who famously advised me that living in this part of the world where houses are built on dunes and a crawl space is all that lies beneath one's home was surely wrong. Her exact words were: "Taint right. People who live in a house with no cellar have no roots".

There is some truth to that aphorism. Cellars, not basements mind you, tend to ground you--they are the repositories of things best kept out of sight, the storehouse of things we wish to keep but for which we no longer have any use. They are dark, and cool, and sometimes a storehouse for those vegetables we grew in great quantity and hope to enjoy through the Winter. They house mysteries for a next generation to uncover and puzzle out, or throw out, rightly discarding what we should have parted with long ago.

But all that said, they are roots that ground a home and a life. We have other roots in our lives, our families and loved ones, our friends, perhaps our careers or hobbies, and for some, faith. These are the people and things that keep us from drifting along idly observing but never participating. Roots are a good thing until they aren't, when we mistake them for convictions.

Too many have done so and do so today. They believe they must uphold some commitment to a perverse ideal or a way of life older than generations of their kind--not for its virtues but its longevity. Roots such as these are the Hatfields and McCoys-quarrelsome, and bitter over contentions long since past, but kept alive by the depth of their stubborn resistance to the light. There is a reason they dwell in the dark, because exposed to the light of day they reveal a grotesque form--an inhumanity unable to forgive or forget; a slowly simmering resentment that threatens the house that shelters it--the body politic.

A great deal of what is going on in our country today is just this, a war between an idealized past that few ever experienced but justify as a legitimate memory, and the light that shines on mankind when it is acting at its best. Those roots that run so deep and will not give up to the purchase of a different, albeit challenging world serve no use. They are the remnants of what once flowered, but long ago died in the winters of discontent. Best to pull them out by every power we possess. And then, replant, and let a new and better life flourish where once their bitterness dwelt.