Roots That Run Deep

Our recent trip to Minnesota took us east 1,420 miles to see family we spend much of the year missing. We attended a wedding that made us realize just how young we aren’t anymore. We swam with cousins even when it was too cold outside. We caught a bit of a thunderstorm – the variety that doesn’t make an appearance in Washington State. We introduced our kids to fireflies and the Mall of America. We viewed the construction of the new Vikings stadium, visited the hog farm, and rode the big red tractors for which appreciation runs thick in the family bloodlines.

And we spent some time in the town my husband grew up in. Egerton, Minnesota – population about 1,000 – and the closest thing I’ve ever seen to Mayberry.

My husband was 10 when his family moved away from the state and the farm he loved. Leaving behind the land he learned to drive a tractor on, the city pool he learned to swim in and the grandparents he saw daily.  He moved to California and later to Washington.  He hated those moves.  Each one gradually farther from the people and the life that felt like home.

 

 

At the wedding we ran into his third grade teacher, who still remembered him. I can’t imagine my third grade teacher remembers me, but this is normal here. A town where the families weave together and intertwine. A town where you are more than just a third grader, you are so and so’s nephew and grandson and neighbor. You are known.

I’ve never lived in a town this small, with roots this deep.

We drove by the school and visited the pool and the Dutch bakery. We drove out to the farm that raised him, the creek he and his brothers fished in any chance they got and he showed me which trees he loved to climb.

We also visited his grandparents while we were in town. There are three still living. Living nowhere else but Egerton, Minnesota. Each time we return here these aging cornerstones of my husband’s childhood are an increasingly weathered version of the grandparents that fill his memories. Smiles even time cannot fade, but bodies less responsive, less cooperative.

 

 

And it all made my husband a bit sad.

It’s hard to hug your grandpas, your grandma for what may very well be the last time. It’s hard wishing for more time, fewer miles and more memories between us.  Distance is hard on families.  We wish we could have made it back for more holidays, wish that the ten years he called Minnesota home could have stretched a little longer. Long enough to make a bow and arrow one more time with one grandpa, or drive tractor one more time with the other. Long enough for one more Thanksgiving dinner around the ping pong table, or just one more Sunday dinner made by grandma.

When my husband was 9 he thought he’d spend the rest of his life in that town. He thought, as much as 9 year old boys do about this sort of thing, that he’d marry a local and farm with red tractors just like everyone else. This black dirt and acres and acres of corn and soybeans was the entire world to him.

 

 

It made me think of my own crew of four kids, none of them older than ten. Our little home is the world to them right now too, yet I have no idea where they will be when they are 36. Will they have to fly 1,420 miles to see me? Are the memories we’ve laid here enough to sustain them for a lifetime? Are their roots deep enough to always draw them back?

My seven year old daughter tells me she want to be a ballerina and dance in Paris when she grows up. I smile and tell her that is a fabulous idea and that I will be watching her from the front row. But a part of me aches a bit too. Aches at the idea of my family spread across miles, long flights separating us. There is no way I can hold this all together; I don’t know the plans He has for them. So I will enjoy the now, more than ever.  We will make memories every chance we get and hope that is always enough to bring them back from wherever their roads take them.

 

Now we live on a 3 acre piece of land that my husband hand-picked.  No corn or soybeans, but a little spot hemmed in by grapes and plums, cherry and apple trees. We built a house on a hill with a daylight basement, just like the one he always wanted. Blessings abound for us in Washington and he would always say he is happy here.  But even so, a piece of his heart will always belong to Minnesota.