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Category: belonging

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.

Quarter Century

Quarter Century

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I had a reference point, so I looked it up. Mother’s Day, 1989, was May 14. That’s the day we moved to northern Virginia. Suzanne was six months old. We planned to stay “a couple of years.”

But two years passed, then four, eight, twelve; they passed in a whirl of babies and toddlers and deadlines and milestones. And when I realized what was happening, that I was settling in a place I never intended to stay, I chafed at that fact.

It wasn’t the house itself or the immediate neighborhood that rankled, but the suburban experience. The tidy lawns and mulched trees, the lawnmowers and snow blowers that seemed always to be whirring. The traffic, the homogeneity, the “placelessness.” The influx of affluence that led our children to ask us why they couldn’t live in a house with a two-story foyer.

But a few years ago (yikes, almost ten!) I began to work downtown. I explored the neighborhoods of D.C. — Brookland, Capitol Hill, Penn Quarter. There was an energy and a discombobulation that felt new and familiar at the same time. There were long city blocks where I could stretch my legs. Without intending to, I began to soften toward the place.

This is good, because what’s happened in the last quarter century — what’s happened when I haven’t been looking — is that northern Virginia has become our home. I still may thrash at its limitations, but it’s where two of my children were born and where all of them grew up. This is their place, where they’ve come alive to the world.

A lot can happen in a quarter century. A lot has.

Going Solo

Going Solo

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An early walk this morning, and along the path I kept bumping into groups of runners. Each cluster of three or four would ask me if others were up ahead. I smiled and pointed behind me. Yes, they were all there, the pack.

I was glad to be of help — but even happier that I was running alone and not with others.

I belong to a family, a workplace, a church, a book group, a writer’s group and a tap dance class. But organized running is not for me.

Trail time is for thinking, listening to music, putting the day into perspective

And these are tasks best performed alone.

Blue Marble

Blue Marble

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It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 17 astronauts’ famous photo of earth from space, the  Writer’s Almanac tells me. It was the first time our planet was photographed whole and entire, its mountains and deserts and oceans in clear relief. Clouds like tufts of baby’s hair after a bath, when you comb it, still wet, into ridges and whorls.

It is a snapshot in time — a cyclone forms over the Indian Ocean — but so much more. It is our own precious, fragile earth. And it was the last time humans would be in a position to photograph it. (Robots were in charge of subsequent lunar missions.)

Just coincidentally, the Writer’s Almanac informs me that today is also the birthday of writer Willa Cather, who said, “We come and go but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”

When we see our planet from space, how can we not love it more?  Not just our own corner of it, but all of it. How can we not want to do everything we can to protect it?

Photo: NASA

History Lesson

History Lesson

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“Do you want to hold it?” asked Jim Lewis, our tour guide. “You might need both hands.”

And with that he passed me a 12-pound cannonball that, yes, was easier to hold with two hands than with one.

Lewis is a member of the Hunter Mill Defense League, which sounds like some sort of retro radical 60s organization but is actually a group of citizens formed to protect and defend the lovely, historic and oft-threatened (by development and widening) Hunter Mill Road.

Lewis and colleagues have bushwacked their way through the rolling hills of western Fairfax County, discovering old road beds, abandoned millraces and confederate earthworks, cannonballs and former camp sites. Now they’re sharing their knowledge through lectures, booklets and the occasional tour.

Yesterday’s four-hour jaunt delivered more information and ideas than I could possibly capture in a single post.  Like the cannonball, it was a lot to handle. It gave me a plethora of ways to see this land I live in. A place of history and of depth. 



(Jim Lewis and cannonball near the Confederate earthworks he found in the woods behind his backyard.)

Beauty

Beauty

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From childhood on, we are taught to distrust appearances. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” “Beauty is only skin deep.”

But in my few days at the shore I’ve thought a lot about the role beauty plays in our attraction to a place. Ruling out the way we feel about our hometowns (in which case, perhaps, the reverse is true — the beauty flows from the inside-out knowledge of the city, town or patch of land we call home) — don’t we often choose to be somewhere because of the view out a bay window or the way the light colors the sky at sunset.

Something in these physical details speaks to us, calls our name, and we will spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out why.

Tenderness

Tenderness

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To belong to a place means that you feel tender toward it.
You are concerned for its welfare. When you return to this place after an
absence short or great, you are surprised by the feelings it evokes in you. You
were not aware that you missed it, but you did.
The little things you
notice now, the parade of ducks that create a traffic jam because motorists
wait for them to pass (and this doesn’t irritate you), the sea grass
that waves in the breeze, the antics of the sandpipers, the lugubrious horseshoe
crabs (are they living or dead?), the egrets that look like an Egyptian
hieroglyphic, the section of the beach that is sealed off by ropes to allow sea turtle eggs
to mature in peace (and this doesn’t irritate you, either) — all of these
familiars are made precious by repetition and knowledge.
And that view from the bridge, it still brings a gasp of delight. But now you look forward to it — because you know it is there.
Belonging Matters

Belonging Matters

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We will never understand evil and yet, since last Friday’s horrific event in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, we have been trying. Alleged mass murderer James Holmes amassed a large cache of weapons and ammunition, all of which he acquired legally. How can we use existing laws and safeguards to stop such madness? Should we reinstate the ban on assault weapons that expired eight years ago? Is there a way to catch incipient insanity through a more rigorous and well funded mental health network? And what about the culture of violence; to what extent did that lead to Columbine, Virginia Tech and now Aurora?

There is one potential cause I’ve heard little about, though, one that might be considered with the others. Holmes was a native of California living in Colorado. Like many of us (and in some places most of us) he wasn’t living in a place he knew well or that knew him.

“The news reports you hear about him, it’s as if people are talking
about one person in San Diego and one in Colorado. Who he is now is not
who he was in San Diego,” said William Parkman, 19, who went to school with Holmes’ younger sister, in USA Today. 

This, of course, doesn’t provide an immediate explanation for Holmes’ actions, but it does provide an underlying one.  The “lone wolf” exists on the fringes of society; he is not part of a community. The people he kills aren’t known to him; they are characters in a movie, props in his own demented play.

Holmes sought notoriety. He wanted to be known, to set himself apart in a society of malls and mega-theaters and anonymous, empty suburban bustle. He wanted to set himself apart as a scientist, too, but that accomplishment was apparently eluding him.

We have only begun to plumb the mysteries of his psyche, of the mental illness that may have driven him to such unspeakable acts. But even patients with schizophrenia seem to do better when they are part of a family and a community. The World Health Organization’s International Pilot Study on Schizophrenia tracked 3,300 patients in a dozen countries and found that patients in poorer countries did better than those in more well-off ones. Families and communities in countries like India and Nigeria are more likely to care for patients, to give them jobs, to include them in day-to-day life. The human touch, it appears, is more important than we think. And it seems to be more readily available elsewhere than in the U.S., where individual autonomy and accomplishment trump social and family connections.

But what happens when we fail? When accomplishment isn’t enough? When autonomy forces us deeper and deeper into our own misguided thoughts?

Tragedies force us to take stock of ourselves and the world we have created. The random violence abroad in this land (and which, unfortunately, we seem to have exported) makes me think there is more to place than how we feel about where we live.  For the more than the last half century, moving up has often meant moving out.  We’re beginning to see what a culture of anonymity looks like. Yes, we are free. No one knows our business. But what have we become?

Belonging matters.