Girl1 just taught girl2 how to finger knit. Both of them sit around in the evening now with yarn hanging off their fingers, busily creating slender, orderly rows of knotted yarn.

However, those rows live a precarious existence. As girl1 discovered when she went to the powder room and set her current project down on the coffee table, one good tug on the string can unravel an hour's work.

Another friend of mine left Beaverton this weekend.

That makes two of my wives-of-Japanese-men gone, along with their children, the all-but-cousins of my own children.

My life in Beaverton is unraveling. Whether this is fate's way of making it easier to leave, as we will whether the house sells or not come August, or whether this is just coincidence, I don't know.

All I know is that while I thought I had put down deep, enduring roots here in Beaverton, that this was the place my children would go to high school, that they would be "Oregonians" it isn't going to be that way.

And while I hope that our move to Minnesota will be one of my last, the current economic climate makes me think that I may have been fooling myself to think that my life will ever allow me to put down deep roots at all.

Because you know what they don't tell you when you marry a person not from your country, and embrace their culture, and seek out others like yourself, is that you are self-selecting into a group of people that are, by definition, pulled in many directions.

That may not be able to put down deep roots in any community or stay in one place for too long.

So your friends may up and move to Japan for a few years, or go there for half a year for their children's sake, or not be around every summer.

So I guess we'll have to find other ways than deep roots to weave together our lives.