Roots and Rootlessness

I don’t think that I really know what it means to live in a community where the word actually means something that is different from, say, living in a small town. The people who move to Point Roberts often long to live in a community, but they mostly don’t seem to have any more idea than I do about how to make that happen. Point Roberts is a community for some people: they were born here, their parents were born here, they grew up and maybe went away to school, but then came back and got jobs and houses and spouses and children. They remember it for what it was and is as an aspect of their daily lives, not as an interesting study.

Two of my quilting students come from such a family. Their grandparents were both born here on the Point and I can point to the houses they grew up in. Their grandfather was the minister in the local and only church, a Lutheran Church, but because everyone here was not a Lutheran, he officiated at the church in such a way that everyone felt welcome, and he did so for many years until he retired. The new minister is from away, however.

The minister’s children grew up here and at least two of them have come back to make their lives on the Point. These two daughters are also the mothers of my two quilting students. The girls are remarkable, both in their willingness to work at something month after month and in their sensibleness. When they began, they were 12 and 13; now the older is 16. Both are bright and unusually cheerful considering that they are teenagers, and willing to spend two hours each Sunday working indoors on what is in many ways a very repetitive and slow-moving task, although I try to structure it so that there are frequent opportunities for creativity. They work well and they do good work.

They are happy to have this opportunity, but I suspect I am the real beneficiary of it. Through them, I get to see something of what it might be like to live in one place, and to have that place be the same place your parents and grandparents lived. They have deep roots and long knowledge and a calmness I don’t associate with teenage years.

Here is a list of the places I have lived since I was born: Pocatello, ID; Bozeman, MT; Canton, NY; Morley, NY; San Diego, CA; Brentwood, CA; West Hollywood, CA; Westwood, CA; Beverly Hills, CA; Culver City, CA; Lakeville, MA; Yap, Micronesia; Beverly Hills, CA (again); Venice, CA; Westwood, CA (again); Brentwood, CA (again); Roberts Creek, BC; and Point Roberts, CA.

I suspect my life is as alien to my students as theirs is to me, but I am living perhaps the more typical life of an American in the 20th and 21st Centuries. We all three come from immigrant stock, but some immigrant families stayed put and some learned the lesson of motion and kept on moving, even when there was no more West to move on to. I can’t really quite imagine that I will be here for the rest of my years, unless those years are fairly small in number. But I also can’t really imagine what it is to have a historical memory of a place that is shared with generations. No wonder we never know anything about history, I suppose. The girls offer me some idea of what an awareness of lived history in a community might be like. And they learn to sew and to make quilts.