It's a beautiful snare, the myth of a home, and I step into the noosed loop every time.
The knot tightens when I try to move away; the cord whips me up into the trees, swinging over twelve generations. I can catch a glimpse of a ship docked off Cape Cod and hear a newborn cry rising over the din of sixty-some Pilgrims crammed inside the wooden walls of the Mayflower's hull. I can twist to pivot as 400 miles north, another infant shrieks, affronted at her removal from a warm womb into the frigid Laurentian winter seeping through cracks in the barely habitable shelter of L'Habitation.
It is 1620, and Peregrine White and Hélène Desportes are newborn flags shoved into the loam of North America, the original anchor babies. But they are also helixes, roots coiling beneath the soil for nearly four centuries, twisting until they taper and touch...
