In our neighbor’s yard, three landscape gardeners are unrolling rolls of lawn grass. The dark topsoil will soon be covered, and a garden will have been recreated in a space of three days, complete with sapling trees, a series of flowering bushes and two oversized planters that add color to the patio area adjoining the house.

The garden has lain waste for eleven months, ever since a freak tornado first since felled its trees. The old garden disappeared in one day. The new garden appeared almost as quickly. Soon it will look like there had never been something else there, just as it does in our own garden, whose toppled trees have been replaced with shrubs and saplings and a lawn shaped with a convoluted edging.

But it will never feel like home again, the canopy-less football field-like yard making it impossible to go outside in the burning summers, the oversized branch that had shaded my home office window now absent; inside is now a sweat-drenched sauna. “Trees of Heaven. Shallow rooted,” the maintenance company had complained, chain-sawing the lumber of their trunks.

Soon after, we move across town, leaving our first US rented home. Biden’s election win gives us the reassurance we need that we can truly stay. We buy a cheaper house with a gigantic Douglas Fir outside the front door. Twice as high as the roof, it must be 150 years old or more, and I picture its roots burrowed deep within the earth. “I hope you shoot down roots,” my yoga teacher had said, calling after me as we exited for the US. I felt ambivalent, never wanting to be rooted anywhere, but Portland felt different. I knew there was a chance.

A year after moving into our own home, the sewer repair company said they needed to dig an alternative route, chalking up a line two foot from the Fir’s trunk. They assured me the tree would be fine, but I asked them to stop the work while we contemplated our decision. A few days later, I stood with a senior tree consultant, staring up through the branches. He confided that although trees are expected to follow the same logic in how they grow and behave, they are in fact unpredictable, with roots taking detours and making decisions that could not have been foreseen. “Doug Firs are shallow rooted trees,” he told me, and I looked at him incredulously. “They cast a wide net, but their roots are shallow.”

Everyone thought we were staying for good when we bought our Portland home, but sometimes permanence is shallow rooted, it seems. Four years later, I am feeling uprooted again, in the aftermath of another freak tornado, different in kind, but just as unpredictable for us as “permanent residents” without citizenship. Is it time to pull up our roots and cast our nets more widely or dig deep and hope this storm will blow over, the willow-wisp funnel cloud disappearing into the future?

Lucy Cotter (Laoiseach Ní Choitir) (she/her) is an Irish writer based in Portland, Oregon, where she is currently a project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation. Cotter has published art writing in journals including Frieze, Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Oregon Artswatch, as well as creative non-fiction and poetry in Typishly, Cirque, The Brooklyn Rail, and Mousse Magazine. She is a regular contributor to arts and culture books and author of Reclaiming Artistic Research (2019/2024), a book foregrounding the unique embodied, spatial, material, and choreographic knowledge inherent in artmaking. Cotter is currently working on a creative non-fiction book on embodied language as a site of loss, resilience, and human connection in a decolonizing and polarizing world. A member of Ars Poetica, she is an alum of Tin House and Corporeal Writing. She holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam.