Nunquam Movere

Nunquam Movere, or so our informal family motto goes.  Never Move.

This was not always the case.

As a Foreign Service brat, I moved every four years.  From DC to Nairobi, when I was a toddler.  From Nairobi back to DC, when I was about to go into first grade.  From DC to London, when I was in fourth grade.  From London back to DC, as I turned thirteen.  At eighteen, I moved to Charlottesville and UVA.  There, I shifted spaces every year.  One year in a dorm, and then three different rooms in my fraternity house.

After graduation, I moved to Williamsburg for a year to live with my fiance.  Then back in with my parents in Northern Virginia, where we lived for six months after getting married.  Then into an apartment in Arlington, followed by another three years later.  

We bought our home back in nineteen ninety nine.  Parties, or so Prince Rogers Nelson sang about the year we moved into Annandale, weren't meant to last, but we've lasted.  Twenty six years, we've called the same little suburban rambler home.  It was close to grandparents, when kids came along.  It's close to aging parents, now that the offspring are grown.  It's been right sized for us, cozy with four souls, spacious for two, walking distance to stores and restaurants, but kinda quiet.  Around us, the faces have changed, as neighbors have moved out, new neighbors moved in, again and again.  We remain.

This isn't the standard for Americans.  Here in the country, we move, on average, once every eleven years.  More when we're young, less as we age, but we're always on the go.  Always pulling up stakes, heading for better ground, always seeking greener pastures and new vistas.  

If you live that way, there's much that you gain, but there are also experiences you do not have.  Your sense of connectedness to the land, and your ability to see the world changing around you?  That doesn't happen, not when you're in constant motion yourself.

When you set down roots, you see the wear of time, cast against longstanding memory.  Sometimes change is for the good.  Sometimes?  Not so much.

There are a pair of towering poplars near our carport that simply weren't there when we moved in.  I remember when they were saplings.  I considered cutting them down, but relented.  Now they reach sixty feet skyward, casting shade in the summer and providing sustenance to the few remaining butterflies.  They are good and lovely.  

But across the street and at the top of a small rise, the seamless green canopy that graced the neighborhood two decades ago is now irregular, where a score of chestnut oaks struggled and perished.  That was part of a mass die-off all across the Mid-Atlantic, one that played out over three-quarters of a decade.  Changing climate, dontcha know, as our world shifts fast enough that if you're hold still you can see it.  

There are other benefits to remaining where one is.  One can think longer term, and taste the fruit of seeds planted many years prior, seeds both metaphoric and actual.  Thirteen years ago, I dreamed that my yard might one day be more than just an expanse of grass, and made my very first stab at growing a garden.  Today, I sit out on my sheltered porch on a misty morning, and see flowers and beans, tomatoes and squash and okra and a panoply of herbs.  Over three hundred square feet of raised beds, added in considered iteration over time.  Time is so necessary for growing things, and some things take more than a season.

More than a decade ago, I planted a couple of blueberry bushes just to the right of our front door.  Six years ago, I put two apple tree saplings into the ground in our front yard.  Five years ago, I put some asparagus rootstock into the soil of a raised bed, just to the left of our driveway.

It took three years for the asparagus to produce.  It took five for the berries to really start popping, and ten for me to figure out how to keep the birds away.  One of the apple trees, this year, is heavy with reddening Fujis. 

For the ancient Biblical prophets, the gift of patiently appreciating and harvesting from one's place was a mark of a just culture, and a mark of the great blessings of God's purpose.  

I have, as the prophet Isaiah promised, planted my gardens, and stayed long enough to eat of them.  When times are hard, the prophets proclaimed, you let roots hold deeper.  Like Jeremiah, you buy that field, claiming a deeper stake in place and the potential of the future.