Yesterday afternoon Sasha and I went for a “hike”. I put the word in quotes because Sasha’s a born-and-bred city girl and while I may have grown up in a rural area, I far prefer a city any day. Anyway. We drove a few towns out and went walking up a trail (me in sneakers, Sasha in her everyday street boots). It has been a strange winter in Massachusetts. Rather warm and no snow. This trail had a little snow on it though, and some ice. But it was a beautiful sunny day and we wandered around until we lost the trail and then we wandered back, found another path, and started up it.

It was probably too steep for us, but we got almost to the top before we turned around. On the way back to the car, we stopped to take some photos. While we were doing this, a large bird circled overhead and began calling out—a guttural call I’d never heard before. Soon another bird showed up. Two big hawks. I’ve seen many a hawk in my day, but never this close. When they rose out of the trees, we could hear their wings beating against the air before they caught a current. It was incredible, that sound.

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When I was 18, I spent a summer living in Boulder, Colorado. The landscape there was unlike anywhere I’d ever lived. The woman I stayed with—a midwife and the mother of my then-boyfriend—said to me one afternoon while we were out harvesting skullcap flowers in the mountains that everyone has a landscape they belong to, a landscape they feel completely at home in. For her, it was those mountains. For me—well, I’m not sure I’ve found it.

I often think about belonging to landscapes, but was particularly reminded of it this weekend. My mother recently unearthed a large box of my old stuff and insisted I take it even though I tried to resist; it’d been sitting in the study for a week or so waiting for me to sort through it. There was a lot of “stuff” from the Colorado and California periods of my life: photos, notes, letters. Also car insurance forms and pay stubs and the leases from my very first two apartments. (If there is any moral to today’s rambling post, let it be: I was not always a minimalist.) It’s a funny thing to be confronted with so much evidence of who I was. I don’t always remember being the person I found in that box.

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Some of you know—I was born in Massachusetts. Raised here. I’ve done my fair share of wandering, and looking through the leftovers of my younger life, I have this vision of that young woman—the one who swore she would never come back to Massachusetts. And yet, here I am. And yet, here I have been, rather happy, for almost 6 years.

When Sasha and I talk about our life, about making movement toward something different, about where we might go, we often bump up against this: we are tethered to Massachusetts. Sasha’s been here her entire life with the exception of two years of college on Long Island and a year in Paris. Our families are here. Our community is here. Our mortgage and jobs are here. Put simply: we have roots here.

Roots are important. They have value. When I meet people who honor their roots and have no desire to pull them out and move them elsewhere I feel a little in awe. When I meet people who belong to a place I can’t help but think they’ve done something right. I wonder, because I don’t feel that way, if I’m just not that kind of person—you know, the rooted kind—but that in turn makes me think of Elizabeth’s words and wonder if perhaps I just haven’t found the place that I belong to.

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I set out, two years ago, to simplify my life. One of the goals that I first had when doing so was to travel more. Has that happened? Strangely enough, no. I simplified my wardrobe. We downsized from two cars to one. We created a yoga room in the basement. I learned to love empty space. I wrote a novel. I started a literary magazine.

But travel? Not so much.

What I said to Sasha yesterday was this: When I look back at who I was, I see that I had an adventurous spirit. I obviously still have it. And when we talk about change, when we talk about What if? the things I use as excuses: the cats, the house, our community, I recognize those things as valid reasons to stay put, forever. But I also recognize them as excuses; things I put in my own way. There is a big difference between roots and shackles.

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