Of Roots and Self: A Personal Study on the Sense of Place
I used to think roots were something you were born with. The place where you were born was where your roots were, for better or worse. In that case, I was born an outsider. I never lived where I was born. I was whisked away at a few months old to where my father's roots were. I lived there for 13 1/2 years, a cottonwood puff on the wind with nowhere to land. I didn't fit in anywhere, not where I was born, not where I was planted. Homeless in my own home. I was spirited away to a different place shortly after my 14th birthday, this time to New Mexico. It was a completely foreign place to me, although we all technically existed under the same national banner. This is when I learned that a country was not a home, just a political designation. It was easy to exist in Albuquerque because it was a land of no roots. Those whose roots withered in the desert soil were mostly gone, victims of the Spanish, the Americans, and each other. Those who came later were mostly rootless