A Walker in the Suburbs

A death in my extended family has me thinking about final resting places, their importance and value. On Saturday, my aunt was laid to rest next to her husband in Kentucky. She was born in the state, but lived much of her life in Ohio and Michigan. My cousins are scattered from Saginaw to Katonah to Cleveland to Washington, D.C. But now they are doubly bound to this plot of soil on the west side of Lexington.

What helps us decide where to end up? It is a complicated and intensely personal decision, of course, and it brings into high relief questions of place and belonging. Because even if we’re scattered to the four winds or kept in a vase on the mantel, we still have to end up somewhere. It is our final decision, where we stop when we can roam no more.

This is Mozart’s grave in Vienna, though there’s a good chance the composer was interred elsewhere in this cemetery.

Yesterday Suzanne and I drove to a pumpkin patch in Delaplane, Virginia. We drove past wineries and groomed estates with high stone walls, then turned left and climbed up a gravel road to a steep-pitched farm. There were pumpkins, gourds, apples, greens and flowers for sale. A moon bounce and corn maze for the kids.

The whole outfit was thrown together; there were no permanent structures on that hilltop. You could easily imagine the way it will look a few weeks from now, windswept and golden, picked out and past peak — but still lovely. It is the view that makes the place, and that’s not going away. Mountain after mountain as far as you can see. And, at least yesterday, still-flowering cosmos softening the foreground.

I wound up with more pictures than pumpkins.

The Lincoln Cottage sits on the grounds of the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home in a quiet section of northwest D.C. It is one of the highest spots in the area and three miles north of the White House. The summer home of President Abraham Lincoln and his family, it was the “Camp David” of its day. Lincoln spent 13 months, a quarter of his presidency, here.

While his wife and children spent most of their summers at the cottage, Lincoln commuted to the White House by carriage or on horseback almost every day. The ride was dangerous; he survived at least one assassination attempt en route and often refused a military escort. But he craved the quiet that the cottage (and the commute) provided, so in this, as in so many things, he persevered.

Here the president would wrestle with battle strategies, conscription questions and other issues. And, most importantly, here he would draft much of the Emancipation Proclamation. Not with pomp and circumstance but quietly and piecemeal, on scraps of paper that his valet William Slade collected and placed in a large wooden desk.

Was there something in the nature of this house and land that gave Lincoln the perspective and courage to change the course of American history?

Historians cannot answer this question definitively, but to visit the site now is to feel a strength and stillness that wells up from within. It is not hard to imagine that the cottage and grounds stirred Lincoln in ways that places sometimes can. Above all, the home was a retreat, a secondary landscape where Lincoln could ponder problems from a different perspective.

Place and creativity are bound together in ways we are just beginning to understand.

Yesterday I braved the rain long enough to dash out to an art exhibit at an old schoolhouse in our neighborhood. While I was looking at collages and watercolors and oils, I was imagining what it was like to learn the three Rs in a two-room schoolhouse (first through fourth in one room; fifth through seventh in the other); a pot-bellied stove for warmth, big tall windows to let in the light. The building hasn’t been a school since 1931, but it became a clubhouse for the Vale Home Demonstration Club. A modern version of that organization, the Vale Club, still holds fairs and bazaars and other events in the building.

A woman working at the exhibit told me that several years ago a former student had come by. “He told us all about the place,” she said. “But he just passed away.”

The school still stands, though, in large part due to the dedication of those who loved it enough to find other uses for it. In March, the Vale Schoolhouse earned a place on the Virginia Landmarks Register.

The buildings that link us to the past are a precious and limited commodity, but often we are too busy to learn their stories.

photos appeared in Oakton Patch 3/29/11