The Bus Stop

The Bus Stop

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You can hear them before you see them. The low rumble, the distinctive brakes. A fleet of yellow school buses, coming soon (in less than an hour, in fact) to a corner near us.

This is the first year in 17 that we’ve not had a child climbing on a big yellow school bus. Celia will drive to high school today.

For many years the bus stop was a carnival on the first day of school. Parents with cameras, kids with new shoes and backpacks bigger than they were. We would take a couple of hours off work, chat with our neighbors, snap pictures, then walk slowly back to a newly empty house.

I worked solely at home in those days and would relish the quiet house after a summer full of kids. Now I ride downtown to an office three days a week, and my primary emotion at the end of summer isn’t relief but melancholy. Summers pass too quickly — as do winters, springs and falls.

Photo: Freefoto.com

There She Goes

There She Goes

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Our youngest daughter got her driver’s license a couple of days ago. It was the goal of her summer and she reached it right before school starts tomorrow. I snapped some pictures of her first solo drive, as I did (I think) of her sisters when they took the wheel by themselves.

Though it’s not easy to instruct, to ride shotgun, clamping down on that imaginary brake, grabbing the seat cushions on the sly, so your child doesn’t know how terrified you actually are — how much harder it is to let her drive off on her own, into noise and weather and traffic and tricky left turns that she, and only she, will have to navigate.

It is a measure of trust, one of many we give our children as they grow. We believe in them, of course we do. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

Back to School

Back to School

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The class begins Wednesday. I will write about it often, I’m sure. But it’s worth recounting how I came to take it. As readers of this blog are aware, I write often about place and how it shapes and soothes us. In fact, it was in large part to write about place that I started A Walker in the Suburbs.

A few weeks ago I was reading about an author I’ve come to admire. His name is Forrest Church, and sadly he is no longer with us. I have a blog post in mind about him and his books, too, but more about that later. What happened that morning is that I was reading reviews of his book Love and Death (yes, I go for the cheery titles!) and a line jumped out at me: “This book is about living, or as Rev. Church says, ‘To live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.'”

This comment stopped me in my tracks. It made me think. More than that (because I am always thinking) it spurred me to action, to boldness. Am I living my life so it will prove “worth dying for?”

In many ways, yes. But in one important way, no. My writing life, which matters greatly to me, has been flat-lining for years. This blog has helped a bit, but not enough. I am anxious to write more deeply and extensively on this subject of place.

And so, I looked into taking a class. And dear reader, you will have to believe me here, the very first class I saw was A Sense of Place: Values and Identity. I think it was meant to be.

Transported

Transported

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Yesterday after work I had one of those stray patches of time that appear in a day. Luckily, I had my walking shoes on, so I took to the hills. Sort of.

The hills I took to are part of a gas pipeline easement that runs through our part of the county. Because this land must be kept clear it offers an untrammeled view through the heart of suburbia. With a little imagination it could be a lower slope in the Scottish highlands. It has that sort of lilt and roll to it. For about a quarter mile I pretended, then I ran into a fence.

I finished my walk on a street that seemed wet behind the ears when we first moved here but seems now to have settled into itself. Houses have moss on their roofs and stories to tell. Trees lean into each other, as if to share secrets.

The sun was low in the sky, the air was soft and light. I wasn’t in Scotland, but I was transported.

Lunch in the Morning

Lunch in the Morning

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It’s the first day of September. I had almost forgotten that until I was boarding my second Metro of the morning and something in the set of the shoulders of a departing rider, or some linked thought that came to land on the shoulders of the departing rider, reminded me it’s a new month.

And then again, walking the short blocks here, office windows glinting with reflected light, I caught a whiff of what surely is an autumnal smell. Not the acrid aroma of crushed leaves, but the slightly nauseating odor of tomato sauce wafting from a restaurant on the corner.

It reminded me of heading back to school, of a cafeteria lunch already simmering as we filed through the doors, stowed our jackets and sat down at our desks. It is the smell of early anxiety, of lunch boxes and chalk dust and book covers made of brown grocery bags. It is the smell of wondering who you will sit with at lunch.

For a moment I was little again, and scared. Then I walked a block east and the smell was gone. But the slight churn in the stomach, that was still there.

Favorites

Favorites

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“My favorite poem is the one I’ve just written,” said the Latin American poet Ernesto Cardenale. I listened to Cardenale on the radio yesterday as I walked through a steadily darkening dusk.

This made me wonder: Is my favorite blog post the one I’ve just written. It’s not, of course. I can’t call them all to mind anymore now, because there have been hundreds, though some stand out. One or two I’ve written in New York, some of my European ones from May 2010, book reviews, and odd, random ones, like the paragraphs I wrote August 18, 2010, the day we donated our old car, or one earlier that month, August 2, about sunsets awing us into silence.

The fact is, some days posts come easily and some days they don’t. The point is not the ease. The point is the doing.

The Forgiving Season

The Forgiving Season

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Last week we were so distracted by an earthquake and a hurricane that we missed the main story, which is that summer is ending. Already the mornings are late and cool, and by 8 o’clock in the evening it’s almost dark. Many schools are in session and those that aren’t (like ours) will be next week.

The thing about summer is that it leads you on. In the midst of July you think the heat and humidity, the late nights and early mornings, will always be here. Summer is about limitlessness, about burning the candle at both ends. It is a forgiving season, an easy season. My hair looks better in the summer, too.

So even though I may write posts about the fresh beginnings of fall, the cool, energizing air, the first crisp blank page of a new notebook, there will be some bravado there, some feigned cheer. Because underneath, I will be missing summer.

Post Irene

Post Irene

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The rain pounded and the winds roared but our trees remained upright and true. By mid Sunday morning, the sun was shining and the wind had blown in blue skies and puffy clouds. I took my camera for a walk and snapped photos of grasses blowing in the wind, late summer flowers nodding on their stalks and this one, of a pond near us.

It is an ordinary view made extraordinary by the quality of the air yesterday, pellucid and scrubbed clean. It was as if the true nature of the place was shining through.

I pass this pond several times a week, but now I will see, layered over its everyday clothes, this view — the pond decked out in its Sunday best.

Tropical Storm

Tropical Storm

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Out early for a walk before Irene, I push myself through puddles of air. There is little rain, only sporadic mist. But the sky is gray and heavy, as if tired of its burden, ready to shift it down to earth, to rest its shoulders for a while. And my steps are leaden, too, earthbound.

In the meadow there is barely any movement, just the faintest stirring of the goldenrod and grass. It is a welcome stillness; I pass only one cyclist and two dog-walkers. People are inside, sleeping or waiting for the storm. The quiet suburban paths are free for the taking.

It is a quiet late-summer morning. The “tropical” has reached us before the “storm.”

“A Native Hill”

“A Native Hill”

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I have been reading Wendell Berry and thinking about home. In his essay “A Native Hill,” Berry describes a conversation he had with a New Yorker who tried to convince him to stay in that fair city for the sake of his literary career after Berry announced he was moving home to Kentucky. Berry admits that the literary world mattered to him then (and I suppose it still does), “but the world was more important to me than the literary world; and the world would always be most fully and clearly present to me in the place I was fated by birth to know better than any other.”

The man persisted, politely, that Berry, like Thomas Wolfe, “could not go home again.” The man’s argument, Berry says, “was based on the belief that once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to. What lay behind one had ceased to be a part of life, and had become ‘subject matter.'”

Berry’s point, which he makes so fully and beautifully in this patient, expansive essay, is that he has been more fully alive and conscious in his home place, in Port Henry, Kentucky, than he could have been elsewhere. He knows the people and the place, has walked every square mile of its hollows and ridges, understands and accepts its less than perfect history. And because he has been more fully human living in Port Henry, he has (I extrapolate) been truer to himself as a writer, too.

I could not be Wendell Berry — I am neither as smart nor as stern as he (and I am not a man) — but I admire his thinking and his writing, his economy of word and thought. And I imagine I will be writing about him again. In the meantime, I illustrate this post with a picture of a hill I have come to love. It is not a “native hill” — it is neither in my home state of Kentucky nor my adopted state of Virginia. It is in between. It is a hill I pass on the long drives through West Virginia that keep me tethered to the land I love.