LINCOLN SQUARE — I am, like a lot of Chicagoans, a transplant, part of the great Ohio-Michigan-Wisconsin-Iowa diaspora, drawn to the Windy City by the promise of better jobs, deeper pizza and a Walgreens on every corner.
We bring with us pieces of home, much as immigrants do who've traveled far greater distances: recipes for buckeyes, allegiances to NFL teams that aren't the Bears, and funny accents (sorry, Minnesotans, but you sound like Canadians).
I brought coneflowers.
I know, I know, you can find these in Illinois — they're a native plant, after all. But mine were specifically uprooted from my parents' front yard, placed in plastic grocery bags, and hauled 250 miles from Toledo to our corner of Lincoln Square.
The coneflowers have taken hold, same as me, in their adopted land. But they're also a reminder that a part of me has ties to someplace else, and I say a mental "Hi Mom and Dad" every time I water them.
Patty Wetli and Jon discuss how transplanted plants help keep legacies of lost love ones alive:
Growing up, half the foliage in our yard came courtesy of my grandparents. A pair of oaks and a cluster of peonies were transplants from my Grandpa Wetli, and I have the vaguest memory of driving back to Ohio from my Grandpa Waber's in Michigan, a trio of firs stowed with the luggage in the trunk of our car.
The white pine always looked slightly out of its element in our back yard, but the spruce trees thrived, particularly the blue one. It grew tall and perfectly conical and was majestic enough, I thought, to merit consideration as the White House Christmas tree.
Not that we would ever part with it, mind you. Those were "grandpa's trees," and just by looking out the kitchen window we could picture his forested acreage a half-hour outside of Kalamazoo, a place that laid an equal if not greater claim on my mother's affection than our own slice of suburban subdivision.
When my parents moved into a new house shortly after I got married, leaving the trees behind was harder than saying goodbye to the pink-walled bedroom of my childhood. Carpet, paint and furniture are all replaceable; what's not are living things that remind you of people you love who aren't alive anymore.
We found out later that the new owners had cut down the blue spruce to make room for a sandbox or swingset or some other stupid such thing. It was like a death.
Get a grip, you say. They're just plants and trees, you say. Tell that to the millions of people who've come to America from Italy, Jamaica and China, smuggling cuttings and saplings across the border. We have orange groves and melons and poinsettias because of them, because they wanted the place they were coming to to feel like the place they were coming from.
My friend Sylvia lives in the same Lakeview three-flat she grew up in with her parents and sister. She's a bonafide Chicago native, but her mom and dad weren't.
The amazing grape vine that forms an arbor over her rear porch and snakes along the fence on both sides of her back yard started as a small cutting snipped from its parent vine in the Balkans.
"The grapes come from my mother's parent's farm in the southern area of Slovenia, in the hills near Sromlje/Brezice close to the Croatian border. My mother brought a cutting from one of his vines to Chicago and planted it in 1985. Could have been 1979 — I can't be completely sure," Sylvia emailed me when I asked her for detail about the vine.
The grape jelly she jarred in 2010 from a particularly productive crop of fruit — lighter in color than store-bought and subtler in flavor, she says — can be directly linked to the wine her grandfather made decades ago, across an ocean, from cousins of her grapes.
That vine represents her family history, same as the spruce represented mine, same as the coneflowers.
We are what we transplant.
Click here for tips on how to avoid transplant shock, and here for a step-by-step primer on cuttings.
Got transplants? We'd love to hear your stories — share them in the comments section. Tweet us pictures or email them to pwetli@dnainfo.com and we'll add the photos to our slideshow.
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