August 18, 2006

�A SENSE OF PLACE�

Part I
You have to know where you are from, in order to know who you are. I question the old adage, �you can�t go home again.� I think, you never do leave home. If you ever truly had one, you take it with you. Because �home� is who you are.

I can�t remember a time in my life when I did not envy people who were born, grew up, and had their roots in a small town or community. I was destined to be a �big city gal�.

Wishing I could live in a close-knit small community with history, I find myself living on the outskirts of Los Angeles (only the largest geographical city in the U.S.) In fact, my ultimate dream has always been to live in a mountain community, surrounded by forest, seasons, and (elegant) log cabins.

My community barely escapes the great Mohave Desert, and prefers earthen tones on its stucco homes to log cabins. But in spite of all this, I have been transplanted here long enough to develop a �sense of place�. This is something to treasure and preserve.

I recently ran across this excerpt from an essay, which I have been saving to share with you. It is rich with truth. As you read, I think it will stir a familiar hunger in your heart�hopefully one that is satisfied.

Excerpts from Wallace Stegne�s, �Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs�: �THE SENSE OF PLACE�

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts. Rip Van Winkle, though a fiction, enriches the Catskifls. Real-life Mississippi spreads across unmarked boundaries into Yoknapatawpha County. Every one of the six hundred rocks from which the Indian maiden jumped to escape her pursuers grows by the legend, and people's lives get lived around and into it. It attracts family picnics and lovers' trysts. There are names caned in the trees there. Just as surely as do the quiet meadows and stone walls of Gettysburg, or the grassy hillside above the Little Big Horn where the Seventh Cavalry died, even a �phony� place like the Indian maiden's rock grows by human association.

I know about this. I was born on wheels, among just such a family. I know about the excitement of newness and possibility, but I also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness. Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person. Neither place nor I had a chance of being anything unless we could live together for a while. I spent my youth envying people who had lived all their lives in the houses they were born in, and had attics full of proof that they had lived.

Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don't know where you are you don't know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all- but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in.

So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it�have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

Part II

The little house I live in has become �a place."

I awoke one morning; lying on my back I slowly looked around the room. I thought, �This is not a house. It is a Time Capsule.�

It was once framed as a house, but now it frames a family�s history.

I wondered if the architect who designed it�along with many others� realized what he truly was designing. A hospice for the moments, days, and years of human life which would be lived out within its walls.

When you have lived in a home for almost thirty years, it has more than a �sense� of place. It IS a place.

A place where life has started �births. And life has ended�death. A place where kids have spent hot summers splashing in a pool. And that same pool was the later backdrop for a wedding reception for one of those kids.

A place where there has been a succession of dogs, cats, and other varmints. It has sheltered many lives for short or extended periods of time. Jobs have been won, and jobs have been lost. Financial crises have occurred and then blessings abounded.

It is truly a shelter where the better or worse, in sickness or in health�has been lived out.

Memories� of graduations - high school, college, special academies; grown children moving in then moving out again; dinners, holidays, birthdays, �joys and tears; surrounding brush fires driven by hurricane force wind; catastrophic earthquakes; dark times and bright times; loneliness and a full house.

Yes, if these walls could talk. But that is the good thing about a �family time-capsule�. It knows when to keep silent. And it protects personal history. But the sad thing is that, because this is true, that history can eventually be lost and forgotten.

Maybe someday technology will be advanced to the point that these history containers can be read like a book.

And maybe that would not be a very good idea. Because our personal lives are just that. Personal.

My empty house has become full again. That�s the way I like it. Daughter and family have largely moved in before taking a break to vacation in Estes Park, CO. They are returning tonight. It will be a while before all is sorted and settled, but in the meantime, another phase of family history has begun.

Yes, I think this �place� meets the criteria. �So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it�have both experienced and shaped it��

�Happiness is our psychological report card.�
(D. Prager; 8/18/06) And for you Bible readers:
Phil. 4:11 & 1 Thess. 5: 16 � 18.

Text � copyright 2003 - 2008 The Homespun Philosopher

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