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Welcome 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.
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