Rootless. Shiftless.

Rooted. Stable.

I keep thinking about being rooted, standing firm on the ground, like a giant redwood. A tree that started as a small seedling, provided it doesn't get trampled by the a random hiker, a rum runner or horse and wagon. Now this very tall and strong redwood is being studied by a biologist.

I also think about big families. Families with so many cousins and a few removed running around. Meeting for holidays and birthdays, filling a house and then some. They share a history and are for better or worse weaving a collective tapestry. Something to hand down through the ages. I guess holidays make me think about this more, because we have a very small family, which has shrunk dramatically over the last few years. My children don't have any cousins. We don't have an extended family. We are a dying line.

We are also considering uprooting the children. The shallow roots that keep us here aren't deep, spread out more like ivy, clinging to the fragile top layer of soil, not penetrating, but all the same, this uprooting will hurt, but it isn't like they are as deep as a redwoods. Or are they? We don't seem to have an answer to that.

Is home where we hang our hats? Can we move our home in a series of boxes and in this case a shipping container? Is a flat in a country so different from our green yard and suburban comforts really going to feel like home, just because we are all there together? Are we ready to go where no one knows our name and really all start out as seedlings again? Am I strong enough?

Sometimes I wonder if the homebody or the wanderlust gene will prevail. What will my children remember when their children ask them about growing up? Will the tale be a story of the empty house at the holidays, the network of friends who really make up our family of today or will they remember the grand adventures? What do I remember about my husband and I's grand adventures, before we started our own little garden. I remember being with him.

I can't decide what is best. Is it better to fly free like the migrating bird or stand firm like the giant redwood. Is stability a state of being or a state of mind. It could be that we are merely continuing what my husband's family began, his father uprooted after the second world war and his mother, she uprooted herself, for reasons we may never come to know. Her family, overseas, has pruned her very existence from the stories, not wanting to talk about those times. The entire branch, gone from the story, like one prunes and shapes a bush or a bonsai tree, carefully and methodically, her story is missing from the family narrative.

In my case, I have inherited the cards and letters, pictures from long ago, but to what end. There are two generations missing from my children's lives. My grandparents dead now for over a decade and a half and my mother gone during their very young years, their branch to the past disappeared before they even knew what to ask. It is lost on them, that I roll the pie dough out with the same rolling pin my great-grandmother did. The new table in our family is actually her wedding present, given to her by her beau, my great-grandfather. This has no grounding for them. They don't understand the connection to the past.

With so much lost in between, those people, those objects, they have no frame of reference, no connection. They hear me framing a story and it is just that, a story, not their story. It isn't even a story they can see me in.

So where are our roots? Are we raising kids, who have more in common with a hydroponic tomato than a giant redwood? Will their history be as colorless and tasteless?

Are we perhaps raising children who are learning to define roots differently? Will they value the relationships you choose and forge through shared experiences more than the ones that are accidents of birth?

Sometimes I ponder who can answer these questions? Who are the great philosophers of our days? As I sat thinking last night and reading more about the place we are considering going, a place that both fascinates me and scares me, and Pandora plays for me, "You are aTourist" by Death Cab for Cutie and then I think, am I a rolling stone? Am I like so many other people, who just can't stay in one place?

I have felt grounded to this place, in part to our mothers. And they are gone, they have left us and here we are, not in a place we picked, but the place we found ourselves. That anchor is gone now, so does that make us pirates,marauders or minstrels? Are we in search of a new home, new roots, better soil. Are we seeking some greater truth, do we desire to prove to ourselves it doesn't matter where, but rather who, or are we seeking adventure, to prove we really are still alive, rootless though we may feel.

I just don't know. As I thought about, I think many people don't know. If it is true that the poets of today are singers and songwriters and if the rock and rollers are the ones providing us the soundtrack to our lives, then there is no answer to my questions. There are just as many songs about going home as there are about leaving.

You can go to Elisa Phillips' blog at: www.elisaphilips.blogspot.com