Here on the outer edge of Eastern Standard Time the sun is late to rise. But when it does, it floods the backroom with morning light. That’s what it’s doing right now.
A riot of rays spills in from the east, silhouetting the lamp and globe, which turn into out-size back-lit shadows.
It dawns on me that I can make hand puppets in this light, and I do, a long gangly goose that laughs and quacks his way into the morning.
The light promises a good day, a freshening season. No Black Friday for us. We are after sunshine and ice-skating, the three-mile trip downtown (yes, we can handle that, we suburbanites), and a little more family time.
“Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions.”
from Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence by M.F.K. Fisher.
On my way home from the funeral Saturday, I stopped for a moment to snap this shot. It is a view of downtown Lexington from the parking lot of St. Paul’s Church, where Tom and I were married. I turned my head and there it was, this vision of old Lexington with the bright sun overexposing the steeple and the red brick rectory shining by its side and the late autumn foliage adding a spot of color on the left.
Seeing my town from this unconventional angle I see also the old towns of Europe, their cobbled streets and ancient airs, all the living that went on within their walls, the stones somehow absorbing this life and reflecting it back to us centuries later.
Surely when we talk about place we talk about all the living that goes on within the cities and the towns and buildings, and our noble — and ultimately futile — struggle to hold onto what passes too quickly through our hands.
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.
One of the features I’ve observed through the years about the suburban landscape is the great number of cul-de-sacs. Everyone wants to live on one, I suppose. So I included them in my poem.
No longer “dead ends.”
Now they are cul-de-sacs.
“Bottom of bag,” a Catalan phrase, I learn, via French to English.
Their modern use: to calm traffic.
But what happens to traffic calmed? It bursts loose on the straightaway.
Meanwhile, the lone woman rides her bike to the circle,
As I learn more about the land around me, I find myself gawking out car windows, craning my neck as I cross bridges, counting houses after I pass a hidden lane.
Is that where the old road veers off into the woods? Is this where, as late as 1970, cars forged the creek?
I’m testing the waters here, seeing if history can stand in for that bone-deep knowledge of a place that comes from growing up there. My hunch is that it won’t; my hope is that it will.
For doesn’t this, like so many conundrums (conundra?) depend upon whether you listen to head or heart? You can make a list of pros and cons, but in the end your rational self is taking orders from that fast-moving water down below.
Our thoughts are the bridge; our feelings are the water.
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.
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.
Betty Leet Bell is my Dad’s first cousin, which makes her my second cousin, or my first cousin once removed. One thing she is without question is a genealogist. She has spent years researching the births, deaths, marriages and deeds of those who can no longer tell their own stories.
Yesterday we went to visit Betty and she told us about a cousin who danced in the dream sequence of the movie “Carousel,” a great-grandmother (above) who died of the measles after giving birth to her tenth child, and another relative whose pet was a talking crow.
One of Betty’s stories concerned two store-front lots in Lexington. When she was researching the ancestors on her mother’s side, she learned that in the 1790s her great-great grandfather bought these two parcels of land for a hatter’s shop.
A couple years later, when Betty was researching her father’s side of the family, she learned that these were the exact same lots that her dad purchased in the 1930s when he was looking for a place to build his furniture store. One hundred and forty years (and several intervening owners) separated these purchases. It was one of those historical coincidences that Betty says is not that uncommon when she’s digging into the past.
Maybe it was just the commercial potential of these lots that spoke — generations apart — to these two very different men. Or maybe there was something about that spot, the way it looked in the morning light, or smelled after a good, hard rain; maybe there was something about that place that spoke to each of them.
Today I’m in Lexington, about to go for a walk in a neighborhood that is not my own but which has meaning for me because my parents live here. In class the other night we talked about whether you can know a place without knowing its history. The consensus, if there was one, was that a place is shaped by its history, but you don’t necessarily have to know that history in order to be shaped by that place.
This house was where my Great Aunt Sally died more than 80 years ago. We drove by the house the last time I was in Lexington and Dad told the story of going with his father to his Aunt Sally’s wake in this house when he was a little boy. Dad also spoke about a racetrack across the street from the house, a track that preceded Keeneland, Lexington’s current track. I couldn’t resist taking a few photos of the house. It is quite different from all the other houses on the block. It looks like a castle.
A few weeks after my last visit to Kentucky there was an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader about this very house. It was home to Courtney Mathews, an African-American horse trainer who probably trained 1902 Kentucky Derby winner Alan-a-Dale. Mathew’s funeral was held 13 years later in the same house where my Aunt Sally’s took place. It’s a house that may soon be named to the National Register of Historic Places. The same house I photographed on a muggy June day 71 years later.
I guess this shows which side I take in a discussion on history and place.
