dot.dot.dot...

Last May, I distinctly remember telling a friend over coffee that I think roots are important. And roots are important especially for things like seedlings, agrarians and weeping willows. They bring life! But I am talking about the kind of equally as life-bringing roots that are important to twenty five year old girls (yes, today I feel like a girl). That's right. It's another one of these dangling ideas I like to bat around: place, community and roots. I'm not sure if it's this Wendell Berry kick I'm on or what, but I've been aware of place for some time now, maybe dating back to that conversation last May.

Even for those of us who have jumped on the global citizen bandwagon, we still can't deny the currency, albeit urgency of location. Beyond our geographical latitude and longitude, there are the things that really matter: the grocery store two blocks down, the poor neighbor who goes by Cookie and asks me for my recycled cans, the sorority house next to her, and the irony of it all. Place grounds us, literally and figuratively, and I think most of us long for it because it might make a home. After all, The Secret Garden doesn't cozy on into its plot until Mary Lennox asks Dickon if she might have, "a bit of Earth."

So my place right now is Waco. And finding my personal place, or might I say, self in it? It's a wishy-washy thing I have going on, and usually, it creeps in like this:

Not long after I pay for my groceries, warmed over the friendliness of those acquantainces I side-hugged near the tortillas (still getting used to these tortillas replacing the baguette section let alone the awkward side-hugs), a much much cooler wave of indifference runs through me. Here I am in Waco... I think. And when these are my words, they are a little reticent and a little bored, but altogether uncertain. Note the ellipsis (a.k.a DOT.DOT.DOT). In these moments, the friendliness is just surface, and the DOT.DOT.DOT some mundane rabbit trail that I find myself wishing would, for crying out loud, find it's END. But you can't force an end any more truthfully than you can contain an absence, and right now for better or for worse, I feel quite swallowed by the dots.

Now I like feelings and all, but I'd venture to say this is more than a feeling (Boston, anyone?), and more like a nag. Some days the DOT.DOT.DOT pulls me to tears or to laughter or batches of blueberry muffins (the sifting, the mixing, the pouring, the smell...it's therapeutic). And some days, the DOT.DOT.DOT flows and flaps and tumbles in a way that makes me feel free-er than ever. On those days, I surrender to my dot.dot.dot, and I'm not sure why. My friend Courtney tells me it has to do with allowing for space. I think she's right. It does have to do with space and peace and listening to the God of the universe that is absolutely in charge. I certainly like my free and flapping self better than my compulsive baker self, she's just all thrown off by this ellipsis sometimes and in a hot second, she calls on this neurotic self that gets quite preoccupied trying to seal the deal. Freebird, please push out resident control freak. I know she's eager and persistent, but she's so dang annoying.

So, Waco, 31 N, 97 W, my "bit of Earth" you are also my ellipsis for now. But for now doesn't mean for always. And my free-spirit, somersaulting self is quite comforted by the obscurity of the ellipsis. She keeps me company here. I just have to find a way to keep her around.

I'm thinking e.e. cummings might help, he would have a poetic field day with this punctuation metaphor that nails everything down without actually nailing anything down at all. For those of you that know e.e cummings, or perhaps, know the ellipsis...you know what I am talking about.

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-e.e cummings