Roots and Wings

Yesterday, the girls and I visited a family cottage, where my sister and her partner were vacationing. A charming spot with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, yet comfortable, inviting, infused with a sense of ease, peace, plenty and history.

Acquired in the 1960's for a song, our hostess remarked, "Our kids grew up here." If the walls could have talked, they would have described the comings and goings of 3 or 4 generations of this family, the joys, the challenges, the laughter, the musings. Here hung casual family photographs of the youth jumping into the lake, and of sisters sharing an intimate moment. Not the posed portraits that one finds above the mantel, but photographs with great meaning and significance and their own stories to tell.

Here, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandchildren and great-grandchildren come to take refuge from a frantically-paced world, from the excesses of a civilization gone slightly mad.

What struck me about our hostess' remark was that in many ways this cottage seems to be where this family has established its roots - not in the homes in which various children have grown up in a variety of urban settings, but here, in the depths of the wilderness, at the end of a long, bumpy road that makes some of the logging roads in New Brunswick seem like secondary roads in comparison.

I believe we all need to feel rooted in some way. Part of the reason for this blog is for me to explore my own roots in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and what these roots mean to me, how they define who I am, and even to consider what parts of that heritage I choose to embrace, and what I am prepared to dispense with. I believe that a strong sense of personal roots enables us to find our wings and explore the world, to head off on new adventures, sure of ourselves and who we are, where we came from, and where we can return (if only in our hearts and minds), when we need the refuge, the comfort, the connection, with our past.

The physical buildings of my past are, by and large, gone. But the land on which the buildings rested remains. If one listens with one's heart, a return to these parcels of land yields gentle whisperings, a subtle embrace and recognition from unseen spirits: "Welcome home".