Rooted at Home

The other day I was sitting on our deck. That in itself is a rarity, but not only was I just sitting there, I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t talking on the phone. I was just sitting there contemplating. I’m making an effort to spend more time being still and quiet.

My eyes landed on a particular tree in our backyard. It’s right next to the swing set/playhouse that, for some inexplicable reason, still stands, even though our children are hardly that anymore. I noted that the tree is three or four times as tall as the swing set, when it once was the same height. It brought to mind the first days of residence in our home. We moved in when our oldest was three, almost four, and I was six weeks away from delivering our bouncing baby girl, the one who now is merely days away from 17.

I marveled at how tall the tree had grown. Scenes from our life together floated into focus. I remember our son driving his battery powered jeep around the yard while Dad followed with the camcorder and I carried our new baby girl. When we watch that video, as we have many times, that tree is in the background, still pliable and fragile. In the footage of baby girl taking her first steps the tree is a little taller, a little sturdier, but still very much in its youth. In later photos of baseball playing kids, the tree is twice as tall as the swing set. And so it goes through the history of our little corner of the world.

As I stared at the now majestic and towering tree, I recognized how beautiful it is and how it is rather like the four of us. It mirrors our evolution. All the while our young family was growing and developing, so was that tree. Like us it has weathered sunny days and stormy times, but it grew to be strong and resilient. Like us, it has some twists and imperfections, but you only see those when you look really hard. And, in fact, they only add to the character and appeal of its appearance. Perhaps a tree grown in a climate-controlled greenhouse, where everything is optimal, can become a perfect specimen with no flaws, but our tree triumphed not in an artificial environment, but in the real world. We are triumphing, too, I think. We four branch out as separate individuals, living independent lives, but at our foundation, like the trunk of our old tree, we come together to form a solid base from which to draw strength.

Like our tree we’re still growing and reaching higher. We don’t know all the different ways we’ll branch out and bloom, but I’m pretty sure we’ll always find comfort and strength in being firmly rooted at home.