The Greenhouse
A Sunday Scribbling:
Like the broccoli and kale starts I’ve been planting in my garden, I was taken from the safety of the greenhouse of my childhood and transplanted somewhere else.
I used to lie in bed at night as a young girl and think about life. Why in the world would I want to go out and find someone to marry to make a new family with when I already had a good family? Why would I want to find a stranger to live with when I was happy where I was?
Pulled up by my roots, I didn’t want to go, but eventually I yielded to something larger than myself and made the move from Massachusetts to Texas in 1978 because my husband at the time had work there.
The Texas transplant didn’t fully take, but I was nourished for the years I lived there. I loved the fields of bluebonnets, but not the hot weather. I loved my first husband’s family, but not the lack of hilly landscape and seasons. I loved the early days after my sons were born, but not being so far away from my own family.
After seven years and with two young sons, my first husband and I set out for Virginia. Drawing on my love of Annie Oakley and Daniel Boone, we headed for Virginia to homestead and home school our sons. We were young and adventurous and sought like-minded souls rooted in a vision of community.
Like a goldfish that was taken from a bowl to a fish tank and then to a river, in Virginia I was out of the pot. With acres of green space and others who were plowing and planting in the same garden, I have grown in ways that the girl could not have imagined. Although, the first marriage wasn’t meant to last, the move to Virginia led me to Joe, the true love of my life who I would not have found had I stayed in Massachusetts.
My sons are rooted here and I am rooted to them. But my own roots trace back to the place of the green house, and so the theme of my life has become being torn between two places. One has mountains, one has an ocean, and both have family.
I dream of Hull the way I imagine my Grandmother dreamt of her homeland in Youhal, Ireland. I have a recurring dream of walking the length of Hull, the way we used to as kids when we spent all our money, including our bus fare, at Paragon Park and had no way home but to walk. I think I’m the only kid in my family, or all of Hull for that matter, who grew up when Paragon was still there and never rode on the roller coaster. I always played it safe, not like my reckless brothers.
My childhood home was green. It was taken by our town through eminent domain and burned to the ground. Like our green house at 10 ½ Spring Street, the sewage plant building that now stands in its place faces the Hull Village Cemetery, the place we played and sledded as kids before it was so filled up with gravestones, the place where two of my brothers and my father are now buried.
My brothers feel so far away, not because they’re dead now but because they are buried in Hull and I’m in Virginia … Danny and I shared a dream of buying a beachfront condo in Hull, so we both could spend extended time there. I’m still in Virginia, but Danny is home now. If you stand at his grave, lean forward and look to the left, all the way down Duck Lane, you can see the ocean.
I am rooted in two places, but in one place my roots go deeper.
Post Notes: The following was written via the Sunday Scribblings prompt “rooted.” More Scribblings are HERE. The italicized excerpts were taken from The Jim and Dan Stories, the book I wrote in the first six months after losing my brothers. More about that is HERE. My other Sunday Scribblings are HERE. Spoken Word tonight at the Café Del Sol.
April 21st, 2007 12:41 pm
I really enjoyed this post, Colleen… I understand your feelings of being rooted in more than one place. For me, the pacific northwest will always be home, but I also grew very attached to Pennsylvania during the four years I called it home. And then there’s Coney Island, which although I’ve never lived there, is a spiritual home for me. (I envy that you got to live so close to an amusement park, even if you never did ride the roller coaster.)
April 21st, 2007 1:09 pm
Thanks, Jeanne. I do hope the old time amusement parks don’t go the way of the drive-ins.
That is my childhood home in the photo.
April 21st, 2007 2:21 pm
I’ve always felt that I’m “rooted” wherever I exert the most energy. Strange enough, I feel like all of my roots to the Northshore of Boston have diminished. I feel much more rooted to both Cedar Key and Paris…I resonate with these places as no other.
April 21st, 2007 4:39 pm
Roots are a great thing to have. Mine are currently 500 miles away and are having some trouble getting me any kind of nourishment so I have replanted myself in a traveling pot and am working from there until I can settle down some. advice given from Rosemary
April 21st, 2007 4:49 pm
Very interesting. I never thought I could live (much less “root”) in the South but I’ve been in NC for almost 30 years and it is my final resting place, I believe.
April 21st, 2007 5:04 pm
Funny, I thought I hated Utah, until I left for nearly three years. Now, all I want is to go home, to where our friends are, to familiar if not pretty places. No such roots for the Detroit where I grew up, where I knew little but my parent’s home and my school and church. But strange, ugly Salt Lake holds my heart, I know not why. And Boston does not.
April 21st, 2007 7:37 pm
by the by…did I miss something or do you always do your sunday scribbling on saturdays?
April 21st, 2007 7:38 pm
Nice story!
I’ve loved the couple times that I’ve visited Hull by the way.
April 21st, 2007 10:18 pm
What a remarkable post! Thank you so much for sharing.
Here via Michele today
April 21st, 2007 10:46 pm
I enjoyed reading this post. Very nice.
April 22nd, 2007 12:10 am
Yep, sure wish I could go back to my childhood.
Loved reading your post and glad Michele sent me over! :o)
April 22nd, 2007 2:31 am
Thanks for your comment Colleen. In fact our posts took a rather similar tack, they were just written very differently. I love the old photo too.
April 22nd, 2007 6:28 am
What a wonderful post Colleen…I love the idea of “rooted in two places”….and everything you said….WONDERFUL. You have the most wonderful way of expressing your feelings and thoughts, my dear. I LOVE that picture, too!
April 22nd, 2007 9:15 am
Lovely post. I think anyone who has lived in many places is always grounded or rooted on more than one place.
April 22nd, 2007 9:29 am
That was a beautiful post. I miss Massachusetts too, but home is where you make it. I would never move back
April 22nd, 2007 9:35 am
I really enjoyed this post! What beautiful pictures. I began reading your entire blog and I cannot wait to read more!
April 22nd, 2007 10:11 am
My, what an enjoyable post to come to early on a Sunday morning. (Well, it’s still early here in California.) Your book sounds wonderful, too.
April 22nd, 2007 10:58 am
I tried to comment yesterday….but I was too sad with this post.
Do you know who took this picture? Was it you? xox
April 22nd, 2007 12:11 pm
No, I don’t live in Virginia. I know Becky from Mass. I live in the lakes region of NH now and I love it. I know I’m not as far away from home as you, but it seems like a long way away.
April 22nd, 2007 12:28 pm
I have lived in 4 different places and in 2 different continents and I feel I am somehow rooted in these places but don’t belong to any 100%…
April 22nd, 2007 12:50 pm
I don’t know who took the photo. I think it was around 1968. I can tell by Jim’s blue Nova in the driveway. I probably stole it from Ma a long time ago because she had others and I knew I needed a photo of it. It was also posted here http://looseleafnotes.com/notes/2005/06/a_flood_of_old_memories.html#comments with another story. xo
April 22nd, 2007 4:47 pm
Funny how one closed door leads to another open one. I never thought as a kid that I would marry or have kids. Well, no kids were in the cards but I’ve been married for 27 years!
April 22nd, 2007 5:05 pm
I was never able to feel completely rooted anywhere else but here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I often think about a tiny town on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, though, where I may have sprouted a small root or two before I moved on!
April 22nd, 2007 6:58 pm
very beautifully written, colleen….and i could SO relate with your thoughts and feelings here. although i grew up in KY, we moved when i was 14 to the blue ridge in NC- and my heart has been there ever since. i don’t really feel any connection to Ky anymore.
and i’ve never quite felt rooted since moving from the blue ridge in 98 to my husband’s hometown in MD and then to where we are now. although, we’ve started to inch a little further south with each move. 🙂
April 22nd, 2007 8:57 pm
Oh Colleen it looks like a happy childhood home.
I enjoyed learning more about you….and I’m glad you found Virginia and Joe!
April 1st, 2010 10:52 am
[…] 13. The greenhouse I grew up in is HERE. […]
June 20th, 2010 9:23 pm
[…] truth comes: I am the ghost. I am the ghost haunting my past, as I slowly drive by where our family house used to be before it was taken by eminent domain and burned to the ground so that a sewage plant […]
October 11th, 2011 11:04 am
[…] that burned to the ground? […]
December 23rd, 2015 9:20 pm
[…] home. I moved out soon after and just before the town took our house through eminent domain (see HERE) to build a sewage plant on our land. I was working at a hip boutique in Boston at the time where I […]