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For me, this post is a mile marker, a little green rectangle along the highway that tells you you're halfway between someplace and someplace else. I've seen it on the horizon for a little bit; you could say I've been waiting. It's kind of a silly thing, but this is the post that brings the place: sk tag up to 83, which means it pulls ahead of the place: ma one. There's no clean correlation between the number of posts and the time I've been in a place, but here's the truth: Saskatoon is the place I've lived the longest since I graduated college two years ago. In less than a month, it'll be a year since my car and I crossed through Portal (North Dakota) into North Portal (Saskatchewan), a year since I moved into my shoebox of an apartment. I slept on the floor that first night and ate the trail mix leftover from my drive. I had no Canadian money (let it never be said that I know what I'm doing. I was miles past North Portal when I realized I'd forgotten to change any cash.).

A year is the small change of time, really. I don't count my half birthdays anymore; my own age occasionally stymies me (when I was ten, twelve, thirteen, I never understood how that was even possible). And yet: a year, here. It seems like a big deal. If you disregard years 0 through 3, which have all but vanished from my memory, I've lived in Saskatchewan longer than the place I've taken to calling home.

And home, you know, is a word I carry around, weighted in my pocket with lead, sewn into the lining of my coat with scraps of cloth (I found a small Amish boy's jacket on a picnic table at Wildcat Mountain State Park, once, and returned it to his parents; his name was embroidered in the place where my jackets are branded). Saskatchewan, in my head, is just a stopgap. It's too flat, it's too far away from everything, it's nowhere I could stay. I came here with that in the back of my mind, a small talisman against whatever would happen: I'm not here to stay.

My visa has an expiration date, anyway. They don't even want me to stay.

What is that, though, that conscious not staying? Keep your roots shallow, it says, so you're ready to pick up and go. Make sure everything still fits in the car. Keep the car running, especially, because that car's your ticket home.

And yet, and yet--I like Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. Even as one corner of my mind is ticking towards home, towards departure (I do love my departures), the rest of me is present here, and my presence feels significant: what am I doing in Saskatchewan? What am I learning? There's an answer around here somewhere. I think I put it underneath some papers, and maybe a mug.

My family lived in Wisconsin for twelve years; twelve years of being from there and not from there, of trying to straddle the nonexistent land border between Wisconsin and New England. It was only when I was on the cusp of leaving that I gained any sort of clarity about the importance of leaving New Hampshire, of holding both these places together in my head (and my heart, yes). I can only say I'm from Massachusetts because I learned how to be from New Hampshire and Wisconsin simultaneously. It took me eleven years, but, then, I've always been a stick in the mud.

There are a few ways to keep roots shallow. One of them involves holding yourself apart, taking a conscious pride in not being from here. It's easy, but you won't be happy until you leave. You won't let yourself be. But I've learned to accept that my roots will only go as deep as time will let them--I will never be from a place in the way other people are, people who live in their grandparents' houses and attend the high school their parents attended. That's okay; I'm a different thing.

Here's my advice, which is neither particularly easy nor any particular secret: be patient, be generous. Never ask a place to be anything, anywhere, but where it is. Learn to love it on its own terms. Don't worry about your roots, their depth or their breadth, because you're learning to be a thing that transplants well.