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Category: belonging

Eastward

Eastward

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The question is, would you know it if you didn’t know it, know that here in Seattle you’re near the western edge of this wide continent?

I always think I can tell — something in the quality of the light or the casualness of the architecture or the philosophies of the people. 

But it’s probably just what I overlay on the place, based on visits and attitudes (dreams) about the West Coast I’ve had since I was as a kid. 

This afternoon I fly home, take the eastward journey, which is often faster. It’s the prevailing westerlies that make it so, but today I think it will be the magnet of home pulling me back where I belong.

Walking and Belonging

Walking and Belonging

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In his book The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City, Matthew Beaumont describes walking as s socially and psychologically meaningful activity.  Authors make cities seem new and strange when they wander through them on foot. And they have their characters do the same.

So just as Charles Dickens ambled along the lanes of Victorian London, so too do some of his characters, including Mr. Humphreys of The Old Curiosity Shop.  Apparently, Dickens walked for the same reason many of us do: to calm himself down, to ease tensions. 

Beaumont examines city walking in the work of Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward), H.G. Wells (The Invisible Man) and others, illuminating both the texts and the walking in the process.

 I take issues with one of Beaumont’s major points, though, which is to see walking as a symbol and a symptom of not belonging: the solitary nighttime stroller at odds with the world he lives in (and it often is a “he” since women’s nocturnal walking opportunities are more limited than men’s). 

From my suburban vantage point, walking is an activity that encourages belonging because it engenders understanding. How can we care about a place that we do not know, and how can we know a place that we never see … except as it streams by outside our car windows?

Being Here

Being Here

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Sometimes on my morning strolls with Copper I look around at the familiar houses and yards, and catch my breath at the loveliness. It’s the slight roll of the land, the trees turning yellow and gold, the shaggy white miniature daisies that border the common land garden. 

This is not to say I live in some magical place, some beauty spot. It’s a subdivision in a suburb of Washington, D.C., (are there enough “subs” there?), one of hundreds. We love it for the sense of community we found from the beginning, and love it more now because it’s where the girls grew up. 

But what I was responding to this morning (and do so often these days) is the natural world that is more present now than it used to be. We have lost much during this pandemic — but one thing I’ve gained is a greater appreciation of this small patch of land where I find myself. 

It’s where I am most of the time now. And it’s not a bad place to be.

Salvation in Place

Salvation in Place

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In his essay “Seven Days in a Sea Creature Town” in the November issue of The Sun, Poe Ballantine names periods of his writing life. There was the Diligent Typing Period, the Terrible Imitation of Southern Gothic Period and the Drunken Daydreaming Period.

By the time he was writing this essay, he was in his Geographical Salvation Period, which he defines as a belief, common among Americans, that “finding the right place to live  — someplace with a beautiful view, or nearby beaches, or casinos, or wonderful weather, or, in my case, an idyll straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting or pastoral boyhood story by Mark Twain — will solve the majority of your problems.”

Ah, I can relate. I had a “place thing” for a long time, probably still do, if you want to know the truth. One of the reasons I started this blog was to explore the concept of place in the suburbs, which can be covered fairly quickly if you listen to some folks.

One of the lessons I’ve learned here is that place is as place does. In walking we belong. And in belonging … we have place.

Our Only World

Our Only World

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In his essay collection Our Only World, Wendell Berry writes of the “deserted country” that results from farmers displaced by progress, whether it be Big Coal or industrial machinery and chemicals.

The result is an emptiness most modern people think normal because they’ve never known it any other way. But Berry, who is 85, remembers a richer, fuller, more peopled countryside. A countryside that included farmers who “walk don’t run,” Berry writes.

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’ Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

It’s one of the reasons I walk, too, because it is the gait “best suited to paying attention.” And though the remnants of a once-rich countryside lie ruined all around me, suburban neighborhoods named for the farms they’ve displaced, there is a point to walking even here.

Because when we walk, we feel just a little more like we belong. And when we feel just a little more like we belong … we care a lot more about the place we live.

World Series Champs!

World Series Champs!

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Washington, D.C., is waking up late today, pushing snooze at least twice and downing an extra cup of coffee. But as one of the bleary-eyed ones, I can say … it was totally worth it. It was worth it to see the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros to win the World Series, an improbable, come-from-behind victory like so many of the others the Nats have achieved this season.

But this victory holds no future trial.  The team has gone from a 19-31 record in May to World Series champs in October. They have nothing left to prove.  But as the oldest team in the league and the come-from-behind specialists, they have something to teach us about determination, drive and never saying never.

What they’ve achieved most of all, though, is to bring us a hometown pride that’s hard to come by in the Nation’s Capital. We’re no longer the “Swamp,” the seat of dysfunctional government. We’re the home of a team with loyal supporters (my neighbors have been season ticket holders since 2005) and a fan base that transcends partisan divides.

Events like this help people feel like they belong. And more than anything else, it’s the belonging I celebrate today. 

Indigenous

Indigenous

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As various news stories are reporting, there is no Columbus Day in the District of Columbia this year. Instead, there is Indigenous People’s Day.  Rather than weighing in on either side of the matter, I thought I would riff on the word indigenous itself.

It comes from the Latin “indigena,” meaning native, and I like thinking of it that way. That which is original, that which is true. Which can mean the plants that grow or the people who plant and tend them. Indigenous speaks of a connection to the land.

If we think of indigenous as native, though, then are we not all indigenous peoples? Every single one of us?  We may hail from the mountains or the prairies, the cities or the small towns. We may have grown up in a house or an apartment or a far-off yurt.

But each of us belongs somewhere. And belonging can unite rather than divide us.

Living With Place

Living With Place

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I’m finishing up a book I bought a few weeks ago at the Reston Used Bookstore. Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self (NeWest Press) is a collection of essays on place. The editors, Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson, have included everything from a powerful story of a drowning that forever changed the way one author came to see wild rivers to a piece about how changes to laws and landscape have robbed native Arctic peoples of community and self-sufficiency.

This morning I read an essay by M. Michael M’Gonigle in which he describes a book that he and his wife, Wendy Wickwire, wrote called Stein: The Way of the River. It describes their time of living  in a wild place, living lightly on the land, learning its rhythms and the rhythms of the people who lived on it for generations.

“The Stein may never be logged,” M’Gonigle  wrote of the book, “but now, fifteen years later, the elders that we spent time with are all dead. Here, as elsewhere in the world, with their deaths, the language of local peoples is being silenced to a whisper, and is about to disappear entirely. Here, as elsewhere, the experiences of local places, when there is yet wild spaces and spirits in those spaces, is eroding away. Here, as elsewhere, the strength and diversity and skills of a community living long with its place, and functioning together, is becoming a romantic memory. … Thus does the BIG consume the PLACE.”

“Living long with its place” — not “on,” not “beside,” not “in spite of.” But with.

Last Drive to Vienna?

Last Drive to Vienna?

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It’s a gray day (not like this photo), flecks of rain on the pavement, when I rush out the door. I grab the newspaper, jump in the car, buckle up — and I’m gone. There’s the familiar route down Fox Mill to Vale to Hunter Mill.

I know every curve and hill of these western Fairfax lanes. I know where the school buses stop, the garbage trucks too. It’s 17 minutes of twists and turns that make me feel as if I’ve come down the mountain. And in fact, the route once took hours instead of minutes.

But today’s trip was different — though I was three-quarters of the way there when I realized it:  The next time I take public transportation downtown I will most likely be riding the Silver Line. I will be leaving from Reston, not Vienna. I will drive different roads — or maybe not drive at all.

I can still ride the Orange Line, of course; no one will stop me. But will I want to when the Wiehle Station is half as far from home?

It was a poignant moment, even at 6:20 a.m.

The Iris Garden

The Iris Garden

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I’ve been walking in these suburbs for years now — long enough to see not only what is but also what used to be. On my way home Thursday, I passed a five-acre plot once home to an old farmhouse and iris garden. The house is gone now, bulldozed last month. In its place, a sprinkling of straw, a county sign, notice of hearing. The land will be rezoned R1 to R2. Instead of the iris garden we will have Iris Hills, nine single family homes.

Gone is the mint green farm house, the crumbling old shed covered in wisteria, the eye-popping iris and day lilies that made people
pull off the road to see what all the fuss was about. Gone are the
painters who would set up their easels there in the spring and summer. And gone most of all is Margaret, the garden’s owner, who died a few years ago.

For years the place sat in limbo as the “Friends of Margaret’s Garden” tried to save the flowers by turning the space into a park. But finally all options were exhausted. Now “Margaret’s garden” joins a parade of places named for what they have displaced. On the same block of West Ox Road are Robaleed, a neighborhood named for a farm whose horses still hung their heads over the fence when we first moved here, and Blueberry Farm Lane, where we once picked — you’ve got it.

It’s a strange, sad sort of duty to bear witness to the past, but it’s also a privilege. Walkers see the world at four miles an hour. We notice a fresh coat of paint, a “For Sale” sign, a new car in the driveway. And because we notice, we belong.