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jenettWelcome to our fourth salon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) The first three went wonderfully - you can find them in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.
Topic of the day: having a sense of place. As many of you may know, but some of you don't, I'm the child of immigrants (my mother was born in Austria, my father in England, and they moved to the US in the late 50s, and settled just outside of Boston about five years before I was born.) I grew up in suburban Boston, visited Minnesota for a wedding, fell in love with the state, figured out how to move there, lived there for 12 years, and have now been in Maine for nearly 2.
I am very glad to be back in New England, but I keep wandering back to thinking about why. And about what a sense of place - what a genius loci of a place - means.
It's thinking about walking through Vienna with my mother in late 2006 (a place I'd never been, and where she had not been for 70 years) and knowing how the city fit together, and finding a cafe where her grandmother had spent the afternoons, that looked like it did in the 1920s (they'd recently renovated back to that era.) And it's watching the news (about Boston, about the storms in Minnesota) and knowing those streets, those corners, those places. And about moving somewhere new and learning its rhythms and its things and where you buy the good milk, and which flowers bloom when.
I miss the Mississippi. A lot, some days, even though a dear friend crocheted me a long shawl of river to bring with me. (And I think the Mississippi misses me too. You can read more about it in one of the posts I'm proudest of writing, over here, after the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007)
But I also missed mountains. A lot. (Even the old and folded and smoothed out mountains that are the Berkshires and the White Mountains, whose foothills I live in.) I love living somewhere where the glaciation is a tad more geologically interesting than "Once this land was covered by ice and now it is not." (Which is to say, hills and valleys and the glacial lakes where I grew up were not exactly fun to climb on a bicycle coming up hill, and we had ice days far more often than we had snow days, because you cannot safely drive a school bus down a steep incline on icy roads, and we had several necessary steep inclines, no matter which direction you went.)
And I'm walking to work more often these days, and I'm still fascinated by all the hints of place. (I live in a town that looks like the most stereotypical New England Town ever, except that we do not have a big white church with a steeple on the village green. And we have college-shaped buildings, being a college town.) But there are little shops, and an oddly shaped library, and people whose families have lived here since the 1700s, and my co-workers live in houses with horsehair plaster, and there's discussion about wood stoves vs other heating, and ...
What's your place like? Why do you like it? What do you think other people miss about it?
Music in the background: I actually have a playlist called "Sense of place". Some of the things on it include Billy Joel's "Downeaster Alexa" and Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (the ocean and the lake, also places), but also June Tabor's "A place called England" and Tallis Kimberley's "Archetype Cafe", and Alasdair Fraser's "Road North", which not only is a place, but that brings me back instantly to a music classroom in boarding school, one Saturday in October of 1993, when my AP Music Teacher played it for us, the first time he'd actually put music on for us to listen to that semester, and we talked about theme and variation and the effect of harmony.
(Music is also a place. Or many places. Clearly my playlist is about the places I've got a particularly strong connection to, and there are still an absurd number of gaps.)
Quick reminders
* Anonymous comments are welcome - please just include a name (any name you like!) we can call you. It makes it much easier to have a conversation.
* If you're nervous about saying something, or would like the conversation nudged in a direction, but aren't sure how to do that yourself, feel free to email me/PM/ping me in IM, and I'll see what I can do to help that out.
* If you haven't noticed, comments are tending to trickle in over a day or two: you might want to go back and look at the older threads.
* And as always, leave the conversation better than you found it (or at least not worse.) This part has been totally fabulous so far.
Topic of the day: having a sense of place. As many of you may know, but some of you don't, I'm the child of immigrants (my mother was born in Austria, my father in England, and they moved to the US in the late 50s, and settled just outside of Boston about five years before I was born.) I grew up in suburban Boston, visited Minnesota for a wedding, fell in love with the state, figured out how to move there, lived there for 12 years, and have now been in Maine for nearly 2.
I am very glad to be back in New England, but I keep wandering back to thinking about why. And about what a sense of place - what a genius loci of a place - means.
It's thinking about walking through Vienna with my mother in late 2006 (a place I'd never been, and where she had not been for 70 years) and knowing how the city fit together, and finding a cafe where her grandmother had spent the afternoons, that looked like it did in the 1920s (they'd recently renovated back to that era.) And it's watching the news (about Boston, about the storms in Minnesota) and knowing those streets, those corners, those places. And about moving somewhere new and learning its rhythms and its things and where you buy the good milk, and which flowers bloom when.
I miss the Mississippi. A lot, some days, even though a dear friend crocheted me a long shawl of river to bring with me. (And I think the Mississippi misses me too. You can read more about it in one of the posts I'm proudest of writing, over here, after the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007)
But I also missed mountains. A lot. (Even the old and folded and smoothed out mountains that are the Berkshires and the White Mountains, whose foothills I live in.) I love living somewhere where the glaciation is a tad more geologically interesting than "Once this land was covered by ice and now it is not." (Which is to say, hills and valleys and the glacial lakes where I grew up were not exactly fun to climb on a bicycle coming up hill, and we had ice days far more often than we had snow days, because you cannot safely drive a school bus down a steep incline on icy roads, and we had several necessary steep inclines, no matter which direction you went.)
And I'm walking to work more often these days, and I'm still fascinated by all the hints of place. (I live in a town that looks like the most stereotypical New England Town ever, except that we do not have a big white church with a steeple on the village green. And we have college-shaped buildings, being a college town.) But there are little shops, and an oddly shaped library, and people whose families have lived here since the 1700s, and my co-workers live in houses with horsehair plaster, and there's discussion about wood stoves vs other heating, and ...
What's your place like? Why do you like it? What do you think other people miss about it?
Music in the background: I actually have a playlist called "Sense of place". Some of the things on it include Billy Joel's "Downeaster Alexa" and Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (the ocean and the lake, also places), but also June Tabor's "A place called England" and Tallis Kimberley's "Archetype Cafe", and Alasdair Fraser's "Road North", which not only is a place, but that brings me back instantly to a music classroom in boarding school, one Saturday in October of 1993, when my AP Music Teacher played it for us, the first time he'd actually put music on for us to listen to that semester, and we talked about theme and variation and the effect of harmony.
(Music is also a place. Or many places. Clearly my playlist is about the places I've got a particularly strong connection to, and there are still an absurd number of gaps.)
Quick reminders
* Anonymous comments are welcome - please just include a name (any name you like!) we can call you. It makes it much easier to have a conversation.
* If you're nervous about saying something, or would like the conversation nudged in a direction, but aren't sure how to do that yourself, feel free to email me/PM/ping me in IM, and I'll see what I can do to help that out.
* If you haven't noticed, comments are tending to trickle in over a day or two: you might want to go back and look at the older threads.
* And as always, leave the conversation better than you found it (or at least not worse.) This part has been totally fabulous so far.
Tags:
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Date: 2013-06-26 01:28 pm (UTC)It's part of the reason why I like listening to Kate Rusby (mentioned in previous salon threads). She's from a different part of Yorkshire, but her accent reminds me of my family there. And even though there is All The Family Drama, I still tear up a tiny bit every time one of her vowel sounds is full-on-Yorkshire. (Note: she doesn't have a broad Yorkshire accent, but there are definitely hints of it that come through, particularly in her vowels).
I live in the DC Metro area, and it's odd because most people who live in this area now seem to be people moving to the area for jobs or people in the just-about-to-retire age bracket. It's hard to find people in their 20s/30s who grew up here and stayed. So when I meet people my age and they find out I lived here since I could talk, it's kind of like I'm some odd zoo specimen. It's as though this place is no longer quite my own.
Dupont Circle, for example - which used to be a place for artists and QUILTBAG folks - has become too upscale for any artist and most QUILTBAG folks to live. The clinic serving QUILTBAG folks is still there, but the QUILTBAG bookstore is gone. I'm waiting to see how long the leather stores are going to be able to hold out against the tide of gentrification. I just moved further out in the suburbs because that's where housing is more affordable.
I remember going to that bookstore when I came out, with my dad, to get a pride flag for our house. It's also where I first got a book by Rita Mae Brown, and nearby is a park where I met with a Rainbow Youth Group.
Not that I'm against people moving here - I think overall it's a good thing. I just wish that some of the places I remember could stay the way I remember them, you know? That there were some fixed point I could hang onto locally.
We just moved from the place closer into the center of the city because someone really wanted that land/property, and it's currently sitting unoccupied. I don't even know. Life is weird.
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Date: 2013-06-26 01:47 pm (UTC)Sometimes I think I moved home to Minnesota because the garage will smell like my grandparents' garage did when I was a kid.
I mean, obviously not just that. But.
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Date: 2013-06-26 01:59 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about places changing: I get hit with that every time I go into Harvard Square. (which, for people who might not know, is the area right around the main entrance to Harvard University.)
I started spending time there when I was 13 or 14 (and when you really had to be careful not to wander too far afield: muggings were pretty common.) And since then, Central Square's improved a lot, and Davis, in ways that mostly remain quirky and interesting and small-business, but Harvard Square has lost so many of the places that made it special and awesome.
(There's a few exceptions: Bartley's Burger Hut is still there, but the Harvard Coop is changed beyond all recognition, and the map store is gone, and about two thirds of the used bookstores, and Pandemonium moved, and and.)
I was actually thinking the same thing about Dupont Circle (because I was staying near there for the conference I was at in April, and walked to/from the Metro stop there a couple of times. Though they had a very pleasant if somewhat upscale local yarn store, so I sort of forgive them.)
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Date: 2013-06-26 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 01:47 pm (UTC)When we were moving home, a few people thought I might be idealizing Minnesota. And I said, "I miss mosquito bites. It's wrong to go all summer long and never have a mosquito bite. I miss the way that in the winter you can go into a restaurant and eat a whole lovely leisurely multi-course dinner and go back out to the car with your feet never, ever having warmed up. I miss the constant difficulty of keeping the floors clean with the salt and gravel in the winter. I miss--" and my interlocutor said, "Okay, you win, you really do miss Minnesota. Also, you're nuts."
I missed the trees and water most. I visited other trees and water, because I'm a Mris and we do that. But ocean and juniper is so not the same thing as lake and birch.
I also missed the social conventions, the way that people give you the tight smile of social acknowledgment as you pass on the sidewalk but do not mostly try to engage unless there's a reason. That's where I fit, that's where I feel comfortable. I'm not okay with either not-acknowledging or having to talk to everyone.
There was a lot of stuff I missed.
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Date: 2013-06-26 02:04 pm (UTC)(New England social conventions and Minnesota ones are different things, but not *that* far apart in a lot of ways, which is part of why I liked Minnesota a lot: there's a bit more social chat in New England casual contexts than in Minnesotan ones, and I'm still getting used to that again. It's not 'having to talk to everyone' exactly - no one expects you to talk to random person on the street. But if you run into someone you know slightly, or you have the same person at the register every time you go into the downtown grocery store, or whatever, there's more chatting than there would have been in Minnesota.)
And heh, yes on the list of stuff you missed. (I agree about mosquito bites, too.)
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Date: 2013-06-26 07:53 pm (UTC)"I was hatched!" is my default talking about family icon. Not sure what that says.
Date: 2013-06-26 01:59 pm (UTC)(for the record, the weather, the mountains, the lack of traffic, being able to trust that if I had something wrong enough with my car to pull over to the side of the road someone would both stop and be trustworthy, being close enough to Yellowstone Park to visit regularly, getting to complain that the rest of the country ignores us)
Meanwhile, as a third data point, every so often I see a car with a bumper sticker reading "Wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could" or the like. I'm half-convinced that if my dad ever sees one of them when he's visiting he'll buy it for me not as a prank.
Re: "I was hatched!" is my default talking about family icon. Not sure what that says.
Date: 2013-06-26 02:07 pm (UTC)I miss Minnesota in an entirely different way than I miss the people *in* Minnesota who I miss. (Several of whom are likely to appear on this thread, and one already has.)
And at the same time, I find I *really really* missed being close enough to Boston that it's a "Ok, $70 and 8 hours driving gets me a weekend in Boston with friends" (and enough density of people that *someone* is always around and glad to see me besides my mother). Which makes me think of another comment that probably deserves its own thread.
Re: "I was hatched!" is my default talking about family icon. Not sure what that says.
From:Car seats and airplanes my word.
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Date: 2013-06-26 02:15 pm (UTC)Social patterns
Date: 2013-06-26 02:15 pm (UTC)This was not helped by the fact that the Pagan community alone out there has something or other going on most nights of the month. Before you even add in arts or lectures or quirky movies or community festivals or hobby nights or whatever.
One of the things I love about living in rural Maine is that I don't feel guilty about that any more. It *is* more work to go and do anything that's not in my little town, but I don't feel guilty about going home and doing things at the computer most evenings, because there isn't tons else on offer. And then when there is something - a lecture at the university, a student performance, an interesting movie - I'm a lot more inclined to consider going to it, because I don't feel nearly so overwhelmed.
Re: Social patterns
Date: 2013-06-26 02:56 pm (UTC)Also, traffic/transportation is kind of a nightmare here, especially with accessibility issues, which means that I am less likely to be able to go.
Which makes computers perfect. :D
Re: Social patterns
Date: 2013-06-26 07:43 pm (UTC)Definitely one of the things I miss about Salem.
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Date: 2013-06-26 02:40 pm (UTC)At the same time, I've been gardening my current house for 5 years now, and I'm *attached* to it. Attached to the dirt, to the trees that've been here for probably 60 years, to the exposed bedrock in my back yard. I've put down roots here (literally and figuratively), and I simultaneously can't wait to leave and can't imagine leaving. It's an uncomfortable feeling.
My husband is from the UK, and I lived over there (specifically London) for close to two years. I vividly remember having a dream about walking to Dunkin Donuts for coffee, then waking up with the most piercing sense of homesickness. (For those not familiar with the Boston area, Dunkin Donuts are a thing. A ubiquitous thing.)
Tons more I could say about this. Hope to come back to the thread later.
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Date: 2013-06-26 02:53 pm (UTC)I just know I need nature nearby. We have discussed NYC, and she has mentioned Central Park and all the other parks as nature-y things, and I have tried to explain that it is Not The Same.
Now I crave donuts. :P
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Date: 2013-06-26 03:25 pm (UTC)I love it here. It's everything I liked about the mid-Atlantic and almost none of the things I hated. It's beautiful. I'm two hours from pretty much any outdoors thing - ocean, mountain, desert. Culturally I'm a much better fit here.
It's funny, we ended up just north of the Columbia by accident and planned to move to Portland, but now we're married here and Oregon still has a constitutional amendment banning it so... I guess we're staying here. Good thing it turns out I like "here" quite a bit.
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Date: 2013-06-26 06:06 pm (UTC)For my part I would never have imagined moving to Texas, much less wanting to stay here, but the other places where my husband could (easily) do the work he does are places I'd want to live even less, so it's a good thing that the positives at least mostly balance the negatives.
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2013-06-26 08:17 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 2013-06-26 06:27 pm (UTC)I grew up in a mid-sized suburban Connecticut town, a ten minute walk from my step-father's childhood home and a ten minute drive from my mother's. I miss the trees, the back rock (our house had a massive slab of stone in lieu of a porch), and that's about it. I never felt entirely comfortable there; I mostly attributed it to the tediousness of the suburbs. I don't miss it.
So of course when I escaped last summer and moved in with my dad, he bought a house in the suburbs of the Triangle in North Carolina, which has a huge Connecticut transplant population. The trees are different here, and so is the weather, but that's about it. I hate it here too. It took me less than a month to feel deeply ill at ease over the fact that I am more than 10 hours from the city, even though I rarely visited NYC when I lived near it.
I spent large portions of every summer growing up visiting family in the Midwest and Texas, which were awful. The trees were wrong, the weather was wrong, and the culture was just jarring. I once went to Galveston, hoping that wetting my feet in the Gulf would make the trip easier, but it didn't smell right- actually, it didn't smell of anything at all, until the last few days when a Red Tide hit.
The only place I really remember feeling a certain amount of comfort was Cape Cod; the trees were wrong, the ground was wrong, but the sea made up for it, for the week. I don't think I could actually live there, though, especially in the off season. It is entirely too slow and quiet. Which is possibly ironic given that I am personally prone to being slow and quiet, but I don't want to be immersed in it, I guess.
How do you find a place when you've never had one before?
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Date: 2013-06-26 08:52 pm (UTC)I am not quite sure, because I have been very lucky? (Minnesota reached out and snatched me: I was not sure when I moved there if it'd be a forever thing or for a while thing, but I loved it and it was clearly the place I needed to be for about a decade.) And Maine was "Here is this job, and it wants you."
What I did, though, when I was poking at moving places as part of the year long job hunt was pay attention on the visits and learn to dig for certain kind of things: for me, day to day living makes a lot of difference to how connected I feel to a place.
Living somewhere where I couldn't afford to live without a roommate, or where I'd have to live way far from my job to afford it (hi, Boston, I love you, but your housing prices, I do not love at all) is not a thing I'm happy compromising on. (And, um, I am not in a field where 'they will pay me enough money to solve that one' is likely to be a functional choice.)
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Date: 2013-06-26 06:50 pm (UTC)Living where I am also has a couple of place things that I don't like - no major hockey team nearby, and the baseball stadium in the local major metropolitan is to modern for someone who knows that the stadium is always at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. (I've also been to Comerica Park, and it's nice, but it's still just too modern.)
I miss most about where I was were the people - stuff happened with regulatory, and I could go see them (as a grad student, anyway) and things were nice. Here,I haven't had any opportunities, and the things that were around were really to far away to want to participate in regularly, so I don't have that cadre of interesting people that do things in physical space. My community has mostly migrated on-line, and most of my physical contracts are with people older than me who are friends with puerile I know.
I wouldn't go back there unless I had to, though, because while the people were decent, the politics and the economy made it impossible to stay.
I guess I don't really have a sense of home, despite owning a house, either. Perhaps because there isn't enough of my stuff in the house to make it feel like home.
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Date: 2013-06-26 06:52 pm (UTC)-- I am terribly spoiled by the climate here,I Love living where the average temperature and the actual temperature are often the same(60%F), even most of the rest of the state is less than 'ideal' for me-
The smell of sea-fog is my birthright, I missed it when I lived 'inland',
(only about 30 miles) when it sometimes arrived, I got So happy..
Redwood trees, tide-pools, grassy hillsides, chaparral, dry summers and healing rains,seasonal streams, earthquakes like a cow twitching off flies(talk about 'the living earth'..) --Snow is still 'something you drive to' in my head, even though I spent more than a decade where it happens most years. My toes are almost as un-squished as a Hawaiian's from decades of going barefoot, or wearing flip-flops.
I don't get that Anyone can say we 'don't have Seasons'--I could understand that they miss the more extreme versions they are used to, but not them Denying the dance that we Have.
It has been sad watching houses cover open fields and Orchards, seeing the stars fade away and smog arrive, but that is Anywhere these days, I think
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Date: 2013-06-26 07:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-06-26 06:58 pm (UTC)Or, the other joke, that I like living in New England so I can be soothed to sleep by the sound of my ancestors rotating in their graves...
It's funny, that here feels right, but it's not where I grew up, so a lot of my assumptions about how habitation patterns put together are very Maryland, even if I have granite bones, you know?
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Date: 2013-06-26 07:19 pm (UTC)My place is the farm in the southern edge of the second county south of the Iowa border in Missouri where six generations of my family have been born and died on teh same soil, where the Mississippi flows seventeen miles away and the branches of the Fabius wrap around our land. My place is the acrid smell of lignin sap freshly laid on the gravel in July, and the bitumen-reek of asphalt patching laid down on the state highways further out, the hot scent of parching grass in August and the smells of hot, cut wheat and corn and soy. My place is the baying of coyotes and the hooting of owls, the low coo of doves and the warning buzz of timber rattlesnakes.
My place is the baking heat and obscene humidity of summer, the hip or chest-deep snow of winter, the 'oh god will it ever stop raining?' of spring and the harvest-moon haze and rush of autumn, with Hallowe'en snow. It's knowing the names of the river gauges and glancing down every time you cross to know if they're going to be putting the flood gates in soon.
My place is river-bottoms heavy with mosquitos and the smell of the ever-present bug spray, cattle escaping the heat by wading out into their water sources, and the way I can tell where houses used to be by the square of trees left around them, even decades after they've burned down. It's deer-crossing signs in the strangest places, and the idle 'how many have you hit with that car?' that strikes up at any gas station.
It's lifting a hand to wave to anyone and everyone that goes by, and idling along at 15, 20 mph for ten or fifteen miles until the tractor, sprayer, or combine gets to the field it's headed for and not caring, and it's hours upon hours perched on five-gallon buckets weeding or picking green beans for the next year, hours out under the walnut tree shucking and silking sweet corn for same, it's hours turning the crank to puree the tomatoes for juice to can...
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Date: 2013-06-26 08:14 pm (UTC)But it is so lovingly described, thank you.
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Date: 2013-06-26 08:16 pm (UTC)In about 1998 or 1999, a psychic (one of the few I've ever thought was truly psychic/intuitive and not just a scam artist) told me that I should always live by "the sea" and then she clarified "or a lot of water." She told me if I didn't have that near me, I'd feel restless and angry. Fast forward 10 years to me living in Colorado and, lo and behold, she was right. There was a lot I loved about the state, but I never found it beautiful in the way my husband did. I describe its high mountains and arid climate vegetation as "striking" but to me they're not beautiful. And not welcoming and they certainly don't feel like home.
Now I live six blocks from Grand Traverse Bay off Lake Michigan and I'm happier. I'm not sure that day to day I feel that same sense of HOME that I felt in the Berks, or that I still feel when coming around certain curves in the county where I grew up. But I feel it on the beach with the sand between my toes. I feel...maybe grounded is the right word, or cradled -- maybe even loved -- when I am there. Not loved by people, but loved by the universe. Absorbed in it somehow -- as if I am a part made to fit and I have just slid into place.
Oh, place.
Date: 2013-06-26 08:28 pm (UTC)This shouldn't be surprising. From the time I was one and a half on, solely with the exception of college, I have lived somewhere in that area. From four and a half (the age Drew is now - wow!) until I left for college, that was in a single house, and I still spent summers and the holiday break there.
But oh, the odd things that are part of place. The odd things I *miss* because they "should be" part of place.
Most intensely and weirdly, I adore the smell of hot pavement (and especially hot tarry pavement) hit by rain. It's one of my earliest smell memories that I can distinctly tease out as *being* early - the hot asphalt/tar smell, the rain, the scent that the two of them meeting makes that is nothing quite else that I can describe, but just IS. I also remember popping the tar bubbles in the road with my thumbnail, sticks, etc. Things I don't see today on any road I'm on! That was the house we lived in from 1.5-4.5 (I remember it with distinct place, but even if I didn't, the other was on a dirt-and-gravel road, so no pavement).
We lived in a small town, then way out in the country (10-15 minute drive to the nearest town). Since college and getting my own place, I've lived in a small city/large town (never quite comfy there - okay, safe, dealing, but not at home) - and now in a smaller town/suburb (but with its own identity). I'm almost comfortable here, but the property is too small and there are too many houses next to. Most days this doesn't bother me, but when I stop and think about it my brain starts going but-but-but. 14 years in a house in the hill country on three acres DOES that. It also instills a great respect in you for the pains of living with water taken from a 300-foot-deep well, however. (And by "respect for" I mean "aversion to" also, lol.)
When my parents passed away, I wanted to move back to that house SO BADLY. It is home. But not. It was smaller than where we were, with more property, lots of improvements (including a new well) since I was there, etc. But - the killing blow - it was still too far out in the country for good internet. Alas.
Because home is a wide open place where, when no one is driving down the road (which is loud) it is both quiet and not-quiet. Not people or engines or mowers or airplanes. But the wind in the trees and the grass, the calls of insects and birds, the sounds of domestic animals. The space is such that the air out there *feels* bigger to me, that sounds silly, but it feels like if you move and swing your arms you are *in* a bigger space (and really, in terms of intervening walls I guess you are, but how I equate that with a tactile feeling I do not understand, I just do).
Home is lots of rain - not all at once as buckets, but the ever-presence of possible precipitation. Home is lush and green in almost all seasons. Home is the sound of tires on a dirt-and-gravel road, the shifting of rock against them.
Home is a small but comfortable house. Home is a wood stove with a fire warm on my skin. Home is cats, like the one presently snoozing near my feet. Home is evergreens and lilacs and pinks and plums.
Home is being able to spend a weekend day at the beach on a whim. It's the Japanese Gardens. It's waterfalls - small and large. It's birds, and filbert orchards (not quite loved, but still part of the landscape that "belong"), and books everywhere.
...I appear to have totally digressed. As one does. I'm inclined to leave it. But yes, I belong in and to the Willamette Valley area of Oregon, and if I've left my childhood homes and towns behind, I'm not so inclined to leave the region. The weather patterns are right. The plants and the lushness are right. The water - rain, rivers, waterfalls, ocean - is right.
I would miss so much of this place if I moved away. Landmarks, but also just little ways of the land that make a street I've never seen before "look right" because of what's growing in the yards.
Re: Oh, place.
Date: 2013-06-28 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-26 09:22 pm (UTC)But weather? Climate? That? Almost a non-factor. I'm aware of the differences between the various places, but that's not a...wossname, deciding influence? Here it's variably sunny and usually quite dry. Denver and Boulder were exceedingly chaotic. Phoenix was hot. Michigan has an abundance of trees.
But the important bits? The part i'd call 'home'? That, I carry with me, and unpack as needed. It's not tied to the land.
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Date: 2013-06-26 10:04 pm (UTC)Vienna was *really really weird* for me (because, among other things, I could not live there: it is not M'Lady's [1] land, and she went *utterly quiet* for the ten days we were in that part of Europe. The Danube is a very posessive sort of waterway, I think.)
It's also not weather for me, precisely, as much as it is geography. or something. I need a nearby body of water (river is fine, lake is fine, ocean would be fine) but it doesn't need to be immediately at hand. I need weather I can cope with (Maine is much better than either Minnesota or Massachusetts: in both of the latter, I require air conditioning, in Maine I don't.)
(Ok, I did seriously consider the job in Tuscon, before being rather glad they didn't actually hire me, because as I've said, I would rather deal with moose and the mosquito as my wildlife issues rather than rattlesnakes and scorpions. but that's a whole different issue.)
[1] My use-title for the deity I am most closely tied to: best I can tell, she's one of the myriad of English water deities, with some other complicated bits not relevant to this story. Anyway. The US is apparently a lot simpler for her to deal with. Or maybe that it was so much Mom's side of the family, and not my father's in Austria and Hungary. Dunno.)
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Date: 2013-06-27 10:32 am (UTC)I don't have the brain to write more about this right now, so have a blog link: A Sense of Place, where my friend Elinor is one of the contributors.
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Date: 2013-06-27 02:49 pm (UTC)Actually, maybe that's a difference between the US and the UK in general. Because of the long history and the density of population, human imprint is a base part of the landscape. Over here, it's not like humans haven't changed things, but the human touch neither so manifest nor so...integrated. Like the difference between how a newly-built house sits in its surroundings vs a house that's been there for years, maybe? Hmm.
Have you ever gone to Waltham Abbey? The Abbey churchyard is probably the only place I've felt a real sense of sacredness (and I've never been a Christian in my life). And there's a lovely rose garden.
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Date: 2013-06-28 06:39 am (UTC)My people-home and my place-home are not in the same place, I think. Right now family is winning out; my bornfamily and my harpgroup and the few other friends that are still in the SF Bay Area where I grew up (and where I again live).
After a few years in Oregon for college, California started to feel less like I fit. It's dry, and the hills turn brown all summer, and I desperately miss the cherry trees everywhere, and despite having lived more of my life here, I paid more attention to the plant-communities there. And there are so many people in the Bay Area; so many that things become impersonal. Salem was small-but-not-tiny, and I walked or biked pretty much everywhere since I didn't have a car. I think I learn places best by foot; driving just doesn't connect everything up the same. Which is probably why I've had more trouble settling back in now that I do drive...