I was not born here*
I was not born here. But I choose to live here. I am, like all but a few, a transplant. An alien come lately to this land. Transported by choice and chance from one end of the world to another, arriving partially formed and full of brave ideas about shape and space and the turning of the world and the place of the seasons. But most of what I knew when I arrived turned out to be wrong. Most of the knowledge I had gathered had to be unlearned and reshaped. When I work in my garden, in summer dust or winter damp, the plants that look old and sick or tired often have pot-bound roots. Tight packed roots that go round and round within the boundaries of a long gone pot. Roots shackled to a ghost. Old formed, shaped elsewhere, rejecting the call of new soil, rejecting the chance of novelty and change. These are roots that cling to the past, never making a connection with the world, the soil, in which they now grow. These are the ...