This article is the fourth edition of our Collections project, in which we ask some of our staff writers to write a short blurb in response to a prompt. This edition’s prompt: write about roots. What are yours? What do they say about you now? Or perhaps we should delve into those of the trees, the teeth, the problems, the cause. From the patios and porches of California to the comfort in cartography, our staffers probe their own archive and get to the “root” of this semester’s collection.
Cartographic Cavities
By Sara Harley
Our first exam in eighth grade American History was a 50 states quiz. I thought New York was above Massachusetts, swapped New Jersey for Rhode Island, and completely guessed where Iowa went. When we received our grades, my friends joked that they found the test easy. I hid my score with my palm.
Until my sophomore year of high school, my history teachers gave map quizzes like clockwork. After the states, I graduated to drawing the rivers in China and ovals around the perimeters of mountain ranges, spreading from Italy to surrounding miniscule European countries in freshman year world history. The class was taught by a small, old man who decorated his Ford truck with conservative political stickers. Every Monday morning, I watched him draw with a red marker where to find the Ural Mountains and ancient trade routes in the Eastern Hemisphere. For homework, he filled my three-inch binder with blank maps for practice. I’d slouch at my desk for hours trying to differentiate the Baltic Sea from the Black Sea, wondering why lower Egypt was above upper Egypt.
The vastness of the world’s geography—and my inability to remember it—tortured me in school. I think what frustrated me most about maps was their inexplicability. I realized that I cared less about the grades than the questions that arose from them. Why do borders exist? Why do they matter? Why must people be separated? My teachers would respond with history: war, politics, trade, and anthropology. I knew the differences between countries were vast, but the semiotic ambivalence of maps, using signs and symbols to differentiate people beyond politics, felt like a tautology—they are because they are. Why is belonging knotted with place? These questions excited me more than a score of 50/50.
After I moved from California to Massachusetts and finally to Rhode Island for college, I began to take walks by the ocean. Looking at the interminable horizon, the water helped me feel connected to both coasts at once. I find solace in its boundlessness.
Nonna's Garden
By Luca Raffa
Mom and I spent a lazy August afternoon once torturing my grandmother’s backyard. Armed with kitchen knives, shears, and shovels, we razed the flowerbeds from the roots. The terracotta pots and wooden barrels where parsley once grew were gone. We yanked the smallest dandelion weeds emerging in the cracks of the concrete porch. Thorny branches and roots began to fester like corpses after a massacre. The garden looked like a skeleton.
Though it has vanished, my grandmother’s garden would live on as the perennial memory of my childhood. I remembered that I would play in her oregano till summer twilights, and I would pluck the fresh tops and assemble sprigs for a glass jar on the kitchen windowsill. My mischievous hands would steal fruit from the blackberry bushes, my lips becoming dark purple and my tongue becoming sour. Hornets and dragonflies battled in the air as I would collect snail shells, my fingers kissed with ooze. I remembered marveling at my grandmother’s roses, the queens of her magical kingdom of flowers.
Maybe this garden was the root of my grandmother’s own memory too. This root clenched tight to the long-lost place and peoples she came from. She was the descendant of humble Italian farmers who retired their rusty spades in the wheat fields and rotting ladders in the olive groves, who abandoned their sterile towns and helpless families, and transplanted themselves to the fertile continent. I imagine that my grandmother left behind mazes of pungent basil, swaying lemon trees, and fantastical fennel bulbs that enchanted her childhood and enthralled her with belonging.
The following spring, I buried the seeds I stole from my grandmother’s last harvest. I waited for the roots to roam wild and for the peace of a lazy August afternoon beside a familiar jungle.
Teixo
By Maison Teixeira
The tree in my front yard stood tall, or at least it did in my memory. We called it Granddad’s tree. Just like the tree, my Granddad stood tall in my youthful eyes despite never growing past 5’5”. The tree died shortly after he did.
For a while, a lowly stump remained where Granddad’s tree once stood. Now that stump has been torn apart by budding mushrooms. The roots, however, still remain, somewhere beneath the barren grass of our front yard. If they are still there, is the tree truly gone or just waiting to be born anew?
My Granddad’s life took root on the Cabo Verdean islands of Brava and Fogo. I first began to dig up his roots—and my own—a year ago, when I visited the Cabo Verdean island of Santiago, becoming the first of my family to return to the fatherland since he took his last steps off Brava and onto the boat that would bring him to England. Before going to Cabo Verde, I didn’t speak a lick of Kriolu, his native tongue; during and after the trip, I found myself having full conversations in his language. Even though Santiago wasn’t the island he hailed from, I felt my Granddad’s roots buried beneath every busy street, every golden beach, every rocky knoll that I walked upon during my trip.
I once felt closest to my Granddad when he’d take me into his bustling kitchen, and I’d watch as his chefs rushed around and chopped, clattered, stirred, all while I sat there on the counter blissfully eating some vanilla ice cream he’d prepared for me. Now, strangely enough, I feel closest to my Granddad when I’m in line at the dining halls, and the hardworking cooks look up from their chopping boards, smile at me, and say “Oi, Maison, bu sta dretu?” to which I smile back and say, “N sta dretu, e bo?” in my Granddad’s Kriolu. One of these cooks, Maria, whose smile lights up the Andrews dry noodle bar, was a friend of my Granddad’s back in Brava. Another, Laura from the VDub, reveals to me that her vovó and my vovó knew each other, and that they weren’t just best friends, “they were like sisters”. A few months later, she takes out her phone and shows me a photograph of my great grandmother, my very own vovó Aurora, smiling and standing next to her grandmother.
My last name, Teixeira, which I inherited from my Granddad, is derived from the Galician-Portuguese word teixo, which means “yew tree”. Sometimes, the yew tree’s roots are visible above the ground, sprawling and crawling over each other. For years, I bore roots that I never knew were there. Now, they lay bare at my feet, like the roots of the towering teixo.
Back Porch Blues
By Elsa Eastwood
In the years when our swingset still stood and Tuesdays meant popsicles, my dad played guitar from the back porch most nights after dinner. I’d roll in the grass until my skin prickled and my clothes stained as the sky turned that hazy orange-pink, listening to the same three chords of a twelve-bar blues go around and around like wheels. Every day, every day I have the blues.
My dad raised me and my brothers on a small collection of songbooks he’d accumulated in his twenties as a musician in San Francisco. Some evenings we sang chestnuts like I’ve Been Working on the Railroad and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean from “Come Join the Geri-tones”. Our favorite songbook was one he’d compiled himself—all kinds of Great American Songbook cuts with chords and lyrics—that he claims to have since misplaced.
The songs he taught us tucked themselves into my mind before I knew anything about roots music or where it came from. How did a language so remarkably distant from my experience reach me, a white daughter from Southern California? Now, as a college student studying music, textbooks and lectures have begun to fill the historical cavities: gospel and the blues traveled to my state during the Great Migration, folk during the Gold Rush and again after the Dust Bowl, jazz from New Orleans in the 20s. But how it took root so deeply in my soil, in the imagination of a girl naive to a world beyond her backyard, remains a mystery.
As a gift last year, my dad bought and shipped me my first guitar. I carried the human-sized box across campus to my room, closed the door, and learned the twelve-bar blues. For hours I turned the three chords over and over in my hands, seeing in my closed eyelids the fading sky from beneath my ginkgo tree, dreaming with a child’s misguided patriotism about the wide, mythic America that once felt like mine.
My Other Mother
By Isabel Reed
I might as well write the word “Roots” with a capital R. I think of one tree, and I am back to that summer; the one where I began to appreciate the stream, on the banks of which lives a tree, roots twisted wildly.
I think of that summer and I think: collecting stones and tossing them at the roots, trying to get them to land inside a specific nook, and celebrating madly when they did. I think of wading waist-deep in water to clean the trash off of my tree, her brambled wooden body that she could not clean herself. I think of this tree as my other mother.
To her left is a fallen soldier—a tree that fell so long ago I can’t remember ever seeing them stand. I am terrified for if this day ever comes for my tree.
I have seen that piece of stream change like skin, like sky, like a butterfly. But, whenever I finish weaving through the forest, get to the bank, and see a change—the water more shallow or more deep; another fallen soldier; more and more trash, never ending, everflowing—something pulls inside of me. I suddenly feel guilty, it’s my fault, if I’d never left the tree, she never would’ve changed. But I take off my shoes, roll up my jeans, and tie up my hair nonetheless, easing myself into the water and towards my roots.
Let's Avoid Dentures
By Kate Rowberry
I have no wisdom teeth. This fact I have no wisdom teeth. This fact I have regarded with indifference, except for those passing moments when friends commiserate about their own impending removal surgeries. I don’t feel left out, though. My teeth have ignored rites of passage from the start: I had a front tooth pulled before starting preschool. That gap in my smile! The envy of my whole class.
In the lobby of my childhood dentist’s office, there were game consoles fixed to the wall on which I would attempt Lego Batman. In the treatment rooms, fish were painted on the walls—certainly a play on Dr. Trout’s surname, but perhaps a subliminal, untoward homage to Finding Nemo. I wasn’t afraid of the dentist’s office, though. It was a space in which I could present myself as well-behaved. I wouldn’t squirm. I wouldn’t even try to watch the movie playing on the screen mounted in the ceiling. I would just close my eyes and follow the dentist’s directions. Easier that way.
The final time I visited my childhood dentist, I was in eighth or ninth grade. I had braces. As usual, a papery bib was tucked around my chin. Sharp objects approached my mouth. The hygienist flossed too hard between my top incisors. I was also attended to by a young, nervous dental somebody in her white coat. Water everywhere as she cleaned around my brackets.
I deduced that it was her first time on the job. I tried to be gracious.
I find that I’m still perceived as a well-behaved patient. At every cleaning, the hygienist compliments my flossing. I cautiously confess that I never wear my retainer, haven’t for nearly two years. It’s fine, though. We make small talk about college. I am inevitably reminded of wisdom teeth. Then I envision fifty years from now, when I might need mine.
I had almost forgotten the youthful horror of a wiggly tooth: pink specks on my Eggo waffle and a subsequent quick yank, or a sudden enamel chunk in my Fruit by the Foot, or my tooth knocked onto the carpet. At night, I would tuck these lost teeth into the pocket of a small, angel-shaped pillow with red yarn hair and stripey green clothes stitched on. Then I would write messages to the Tooth Fairy. In the morning, a dollar and a note in response.
Where are these twenty missing teeth now? I pose the question to my parents.
“You’ll just have to ask the Tooth Fairy,” Mom says.
Intertwine
By Anika Weling
Last week, I spent an hour trying to drape my friend in a sari for our formal. The silk objected every time we tried to create a pleat, the creases unfolding as if they were never there. I made do with an amalgamation of strategically-placed safety pins that left behind little tears, and elicited memories of my mother, too many time zones away to call for help. I tried to embody the way her hands wrapped around me, gathering the fabric, tucking it into my skirt and casting the rest over my shoulder so that it always perfectly cascaded to the floor.
My Aaji is the perfect role model. Every day for the last many decades she has swathed herself in the complicated procedure that is a sari. Every day in her surgical residency in Canada, every day as a doctor in India, every day to the temple, and almost every day after. I can see how it comforts her, hugs her in tradition and familiarity wherever she is. The second time I ever wore a sari was for her birthday dinner. The odd looks I received and the inability to walk were worth it for the pride on her face. She was beyond ecstatic to see me follow her custom. She will always remember each fold, pleat, and pin she must place, even if she doesn’t remember doing it, even if she doesn’t remember my name.
I’ve been an adult long enough that it should be my second nature, but I can never seem to remember all the steps of wearing a sari. My great-grandmother taught my grandmother, who taught her daughter too. Embedded in the lessons of the drape were another dozen messages to remember, ones that haven’t yet reached me. I can feel them when my Aaji takes my face in her hand. I can read the lines etched in the weathered skin. The roots I’ll grasp on to for her when she can’t hold on anymore.
These roots sprawl and stretch, touching depths I didn’t know I had, growing from seeds I never knew I planted. They keep me moored against waves, the kind that break when I close my eyes. They reach across oceans to keep me connected to homes long left behind, entangled with every word I say and decision I make. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there.