Roots

E.A. Adams

Dear Sarah,

I’ve started this letter seven times. Seven different openings, seven different ways to say “I’ve been thinking about home”, and none of them feel right. So I’m just going to start and hope the thing I’m actually trying to say finds its way to the surface.

You asked me last time we talked—you sitting on your porch in Opelika with the cicadas screaming through the speaker, me sitting in this beige Texas kitchen with nothing but the refrigerator humming—you asked if I was okay. And I said “yes”. And you said “I didn’t ask if you were okay, I asked if you were happy”, and I changed the subject.

I think I have an answer now.

Do you remember what I told you once about the soil below the Mason-Dixon? About how there’s something in it that doesn’t let go? I meant that literally, Sarah. The South does not leave you. This is not poetry. This is diagnosis.

I’ve been gone so long my blood has thickened, my syllables have flattened, my mouth has forgotten how to wrap around words like “y’all” and “fixin'” without feeling like a fraud. Each corrected syllable is a small death, a tiny unpicking of the thread that stitched me to the red clay of my grandmother’s backyard where she grew tomatoes in coffee cans and told me the dead could hear you if you spoke their names into the wind on a Tuesday.

Here is what they don’t tell you about leaving the South: you don’t leave. You “carry”.

You carry the humidity in your lungs like a second breath. You carry the food in your hands—your hands remember biscuit dough before they remember anything else. You carry the sound, God the sound. The way your mother said your name. The way rain sounded on a tin roof. The way your uncle laughed like he was testifying to the sheer impossible fact of being alive and southern and joyful.

You carry these sounds and they sit in your skull like a radio station you can’t turn off, and sometimes the station gets louder and you hear your grandmother’s voice clear as a bell saying “baby, come home” and you have to pull over because your eyes have gone too wet to see.

The grief is not dramatic. Southern grief is quiet—a slow leak, a tire going flat over months so gradual you don’t notice until you’re driving on the rim.

The roots go deeper than geography. The grief is not that you left. The grief is that you can leave. That you can feel the pull in your bones every single day and still choose to stay away. The grief is the choosing. The grief is that the choosing never ends.

“What grows in the South stays in the South.” My grandmother said that once, standing in her garden with dirt under her nails.

And I am still growing. And I am still hers. And I am still—after all these years, after all this distance—still rooted. Still reaching. Still hungry for a soil that knows my name.

But you know all of this. You were there when I was thirty, when the first orders came. You held me while I cried in my Mobile kitchen and didn’t try to talk me out of my grief.

Thirty years in Mobile. Thirty years of Gulf salt and azaleas and Mardi Gras beads catching in oak branches. Thirty years and I was not a woman anymore. I was a place.

And then his orders. “We got orders. Birmingham.”

They give you a choice. They do not call it that. Let him go alone, or tear up your roots and follow. I stood in that kitchen and felt two futures splitting like a road forking. Keep Mobile and lose him. Or tear up my roots and keep the man.

I chose him. But the truth is I ached for both futures, and the one I did not choose has been aching ever since.

Remember how everyone said “it’s the same state, what are you complaining about?” Mobile is Gulf Coast. Birmingham is iron. Mobile is home. Birmingham is “where we were stationed”. The difference between those sentences is the difference between breathing and holding your breath.

I planted marigolds in the backyard—seeds from my grandmother’s garden carried in a Mason jar like holy water. They came up wrong. Orange when they should have been gold. But they came up. And I thought: “maybe this is what home becomes when you cannot go home. A series of small wrongs you learn to live with until they become right.”

Five years later, the children came. Twins. A daughter and a son. “Now I am rooted”, I thought. “Now I have something that cannot be shipped in a box.”

The second time I was forty-one.

Eleven years in Birmingham. Pencil marks on the doorframe. Marigolds that had finally learned to be gold. A life that had stopped being “almost” and started being “enough”.

“Texas.” The word landed like a stone. Shame—the hot particular shame of a woman who has planted a garden and watched it bulldozed. Twice.

My daughter cried for her room, her friends, the fort in the magnolia tree. Her brother went quiet, arranged his toy soldiers in formation, and did not speak. I recognized in his silence the same silence I had learned at thirty. He was six. He was already learning to be rootless.

The movers came on a Tuesday. They packed our life into boxes labeled with rooms instead of contents. I watched them pack my grandmother’s jar.

“What’s in the box, Mama?”

“Seeds, baby. Grandmama’s seeds.”

“Can we plant them in the new house?”

“Yes, baby,” I said. “We can plant them.”

And the lie tasted like Mobile soil.

“It’s just a different side. Not wrong. Different.”

She looked at me with those six-year-old eyes that could spot a lie at forty paces. “It feels wrong, Mama.”

The first weeks were the hardest. My daughter came home from school with careful blankness—the expression of a child who has decided to feel nothing because feeling something means crying in front of strangers. Her brother threw his backpack against the wall. “I hate it here.” Six years old. Already an expert in grief.

I held them both on the couch, their bodies shaking with the effort of holding themselves together.

And then my daughter shifted against me.

“Mama? Will we always live here?”

I opened my mouth to say “I don’t know” or “we’ll see”—one of the non-answers military wives learn.

But what came out was: “No, baby. Probably not.”

She was quiet. “Will we always be together?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Then I guess it’s okay.”

Sarah. Something shifted in my chest. Something that had been clenched since Mobile, since Birmingham, since the first time I held my grandmother’s jar and thought “this is the only root I have left”.

Something loosened. Not broke. Just—”released”. The way a fist releases when it realizes it has been holding too tight for too long.

My daughter—six years old, uprooted, standing in a beige room in a beige state—had said the thing I had spent eleven years failing to understand.

Home was not Mobile. Home was not Birmingham. Home was not the azaleas or the salt air or the pencil marks on a doorframe that would be painted over by strangers.

Home was “us”.

“What grows in the South stays in the South.” She was talking about roots. But here is what I understand now:

Roots are not dirt. Roots are not geography. Roots are not the red clay of Alabama or the salt air of the Gulf.

“Roots are the people who grow beside you.”

My grandmother knew this. She grew tomatoes, yes—but she also grew me. She pressed her palms flat against the soil and listened, and what she heard was the future calling—the sound of a girl who would one day stand in a yard three states away and remember her grandmother’s hands guiding hers through biscuit dough, teaching her that “touch” is a form of belonging, that “memory” is a kind of soil, that “love” is the deepest root there is.

The marigolds did not bloom right in Birmingham. But “we” bloomed. My daughter and my son—they grew tall and fierce in the way transplanted things sometimes grow. Not despite the moving. “Because of it.” Because they had each other. Because they had a family that learned, through repetition and heartbreak, that roots are not a place.

Roots are a “practice”.

I unpacked the jar on a Thursday. My daughter found the seeds. “Mama! Can we plant them today?”

“It’s the wrong dirt”, I started to say. And then I stopped.

Wrong dirt. Right dirt. Alabama clay. Texas scrub. What did it matter? The seeds had traveled from Mobile to Birmingham to Texas, waiting—patient, persistent, “alive”—for someone to press them into whatever ground was available.

“Yes, I said. *Let’s plant them.”

We knelt in the backyard, our knees pressed into Texas dirt that did not know our names. I measured the seeds the way my grandmother taught me and pressed them into the soil. I did not pray for gold blooms or Alabama sun. I prayed for growth. Whatever color it came in. Whatever ground it came from.

The marigolds came up three weeks later.

Orange. Not gold. Not the color of Mobile or memory.

Texas orange.

And they were beautiful.

My roots can grow anywhere, Sarah. This is what I know now. Roots are not the ground. Roots are the reaching. Roots are the practice of pressing your palms flat against whatever dirt you are given and saying “yes” and “here” and “I will bloom in this place until the next place calls, and then I will bloom there too”.

Roots are the people who grow beside you.

My daughter—still an inch taller than her brother, still carrying her ragged doll, still asking “when are we going home” and meaning the last place.

My son—still quiet, still watchful, still pressing his palm against windows and listening. He has learned that silence is not emptiness. That silence is space. Space for new roots to grow.

My husband—still following orders, still saying “I’m sorry” into my hair when the grief gets heavy. He chose to serve. I chose to follow. And together we made something the orders cannot touch: a family.

What grows in the South stays in the South.

“Yes, Grandmama. And what grows in Texas stays in Texas. And what grows in wherever-the-military-sends-us-next stays in wherever-the-military-sends-us-next.”

Because the growing is not the ground. The growing is the reaching.

And the reaching is you.

The jar sits on the counter of my Texas kitchen. Empty now. Seeds in the ground. Marigolds reaching for a sun that sits at a different angle than Mobile, but still a sun. Still light. Still enough.

My daughter draws pictures of flowers and tapes them to the refrigerator. Her brother counts the days until the blooms open.

And I press my palms flat against the counter—this counter, my counter—and I listen.

And the dirt does not say go home.

The dirt says you are home.

And the roots grow. And the roots stay.

Not because the ground is permanent.

Because we are.

So that’s my answer, Sarah. You asked if I was happy, and I think: I am becoming happy. I am learning that happiness isn’t a place you arrive at but a thing you practice, like biscuits, like gardening, like choosing every day to bloom where you’re planted instead of grieving where you used to grow.

I miss you. I miss home. I miss the woman I was before I learned that roots can stretch further than I ever imagined.

But I’m still growing.

And I think that’s enough.

Love,

Me

P.S. Tell your mama I said hey. And tell her I’ve finally learned to make biscuits that rise—even in Texas. They’re not hers. They’re not Grandmama’s. But they’re mine. And I think that counts for something.