Where I am Rooted

It seems whenever I look forward, I feel the urge to look back as well…to confirm how I am rooted and what matters most.  For me, another year has ended, and another Life List was completed.  This one was short, but deeply meaningful.  As we get older, it is a natural process to reflect back on our life.  How did we get to the place that we are?  Where did the time go?  How is it possible that my sons are the ages that they are?  For me, 2021 was a year in which I contemplated the roots from which I sprang, and the idea that someday I will exist on earth without my parents.  My thoughts immediately turned to my grandparents when I thought about this.  As close as I felt to them when they were alive, how much did I really know about them?  To start this process of unraveling to understand, I made it my mission to visit the birthplace of each of my grandparents in 2021.  I started just after New Year’s with a retreat to a tiny and very old cabin in a remote part of Illinois.  My paternal grandmother used to tell me about the corn (“Knee high by 4^th of July!”) and the family farm where she spent time with her own grandparents, her brother and her deaf parents.  I had a little trouble finding her childhood home – scouring 100 year old phone books and plot plans to no avail – but the essence of my grandmother was in the pores of this little town.  My maternal grandmother’s birthplace visit was also to Illinois, but this time to a suburb of Chicago…which made a nice transition to an opportunity to take in my first game at Wrigley, and also happened to fall on my birthday in the late spring.  Her home was neat and trim – it reminded me of her elegance and grace.  Deep into the summer, I drove to upstate New York to see the beautiful home my paternal grandfather lived as a small boy.  The rain pattered on my face as I stood in front of his house.  I wondered how many bowls of ice cream he ate sitting at the kitchen table, his most favorite after dinner treat in my memory.  My final visit, at the very tail end of the year, was to a dot on the map of a town in the middle of Minnesota.  One stop light created the core of my maternal grandfather’s backdrop to the quiet and intelligent man he became.  The temperature was cold, and the wind brutal, but I packed my snow shoes and moved about in a small forest near my rented cabin thinking about him.  His home was white and the ground covered in fresh puffs of snow, as if to remind me that he grew up in a real life snow globe, shaken to dust you with flakes when you least expected it.  I traveled hundreds of miles by car, a fewer number by foot, slept in AirBnBs and hotels, touched the gravestones of great and great-great grandparents…all in an effort to understand where I came from.  Of all I learned, the biggest thing I reinforced is: “The greatest thing in life is quite simple, it’s people.”