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Rooted
“Bloom where you are planted,” my wife and I were told soon after we moved back to Middle Georgia. We were skeptical. We had not intended to return.
The trip back was a return because we both grew up here, in the middle of the state. My wife was raised in the city we now live, an Air Force community that brings a diversity to an area that is typically rural and homogenous. The area where I grew up was rural and homogenous, where diversity would mean “black and white” and little else.
While she grew up in a neighborhood, I was raised on land, on a farm with livestock. There was planting and harvesting of wheat, corn, soybeans, and peanuts. I remember the peanuts especially because you could see the green peanut plant growing on top of the ground, but the peanuts themselves grew underneath, in the soil, connected to the roots.
It was not until you pulled up the plant that you saw what had been there the whole time, what had been growing and maturing in the darkness of the dirt.
Our roots do matter. When they are shallow, we are not strong. When roots are planted in soil that does not nourish, then what we see above the ground is a meager stalk, an absence of fruit. When the soil is too wet then the roots themselves rot, as too much water can harm as much as the absence of water.
