The old baobab in the village square had stood for three hundred years, and Folasade's grandmother liked to say it was the most well-traveled thing she knew, despite never once moving an inch.
"That doesn't make sense," Folasade said, eight years old and certain about things in the way only eight-year-olds can be. "Trees don't go anywhere. They just stand there."
"The tree itself stays," her grandmother agreed. "But everything it carries has traveled enormous distances to get here. Its roots remember soil from before any of us were born. Its seeds have been carried by birds to villages none of us has ever visited. The stories people tell underneath it have crossed oceans in the mouths of people who left here and never came back, retelling this same tree to children who will never see it themselves."
"So the tree is like us?"
"The tree is exactly like the best parts of us," her grandmother said. "It doesn't have to leave home to be part of something larger than home. It just has to stay rooted enough that whatever comes to visit it — birds, wind, stories, people — leaves carrying a piece of it elsewhere, while the tree itself remains exactly what it has always been."
Folasade thought about this for a long time, watching the tree's enormous branches move slightly in the evening wind. "I want to be like that," she finally said. "I want to leave and come back and still be the same tree."
"Then root yourself well now," her grandmother said, "in whatever this place has taught you. The roots are what let you travel safely later, in your mind and your memory, without ever losing the shape of where you actually began."
Tradition does not require standing still to travel. Rooted deeply enough, it moves through every person who carries a piece of it elsewhere — without ever forgetting where it began.
