The Power of Place

The good folks at the Dayton Metro Library had been gently pestering me for a while for a brief bio to go with the headshot taken a month or two ago. All this is because I'm a trustee, and the library is engaged in a massive rebuilding and reimagining process, which includes updating the website and all other communications. It's all very exciting and, for me at least, very hopeful.

So. Brief bio. Please include things like occupation, credentials, interests, personal experiences with libraries.

I finally sat down to write the thing last week, and somewhat to my surprise the question about personal experiences with libraries brought to mind a series of books I read as a girl. I had to poke around on Google a bit to identify the author and the titles--all I remembered was the name of the protagonist (Henry) and the impression they made on me.

Turns out the author was Joseph Altsheler, and the series was called The Young Trailers (also the title of the first book in the series). They were set in Revolutionary War era Kentucky, when Kentucky was still Indian country and the far limit of the frontier.  What I remembered so vividly about the books was the sense of place they evoked: the virgin woods that used to cover half our continent.

I'm sure I was hooked not so much by the protagonist or even the plot, but by that evocation of life in those vast, wild woods.

I grew up by a woods--not Kentucky, but a Maryland woods just outside of Washington DC. From age six through fourteen, I walked to and from school through those woods, crossing a creek on stepping stones, occasionally finding an arrowhead, always enjoying the bits of quartz and water-smoothed granite found underfoot.

That's how I got to the library, too, to get my Young Trailers books--through those woods, crossing that creek. For me, those woods are a primordial landscape of my soul. They are constitutive of my being.

Not my woods, but a woods & stream in the same watershed.

I remember, when I rode my bike from Pittsburgh to DC a few years ago, how something in me leaped with joy when, after days in the saddle I suddenly noticed that the pebbles along the trail were like the pebbles in my childhood woods and creek.

My childhood creek is now a concrete culvert, and the woods long ago gave way to a major parkway, but inside me that place still lives, and gives me life.

So I found myself thinking some more about the power of place. We are not abstractions, we are bodies in space and time. And it matters what space, what time.

Another memory. My family roots are in New Orleans, and even though I did not grow up there, my parents kept the connection alive for my sister and me.  We ate rice and okra and red beans, when most of 1950s America was eating meat and potatoes. And we visited our grandmothers and various other relatives in New Orleans as often as a limited budget allowed in an age before air travel was common.

By the time I married and started my own family, my sister had resettled in New Orleans, and my paternal grandmother and great aunts were still there, so I made a point of taking my husband and kids to visit, trying to keep the connection alive for another generation.

I remember the first time I visited New Orleans as an adult by myself, without the distraction of husband and young kids. I took a cab from the airport to my grandmother's house. When the cab pulled up at her curb, I opened the door, and the totally distinctive smell of New Orleans flooded my nostrils and my being.  Instantly, with no time for thought, words spoke in my brain: "Oh, this smells like home!"

The odd thing about that experience is that the city of New Orleans was only actually my home for the first six weeks of my life. I was born there (in August, before air conditioning, as my mother was fond of pointing out), but pretty much as soon as Mom was cleared to travel we moved away so my father could pursue a job elsewhere. So New Orleans was only ever my home for six weeks, and six weeks of which I have no conscious memory.

But those were my very first six weeks in this world. New Orleans air was the very first air I breathed, and my being remembered.

Me breathing New Orleans air at age two weeks.

When Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans, I grieved at the core of my being. The power of place.

 

 

New Orleans about two months after Katrina struck.

I'm not sure any other places will ever lodge in the core of me the way New Orleans and my childhood woods do. Those two were so early and so formative. My first breath. The first landscape I ever explored on my own, not in a stroller or holding someone's hand.

But I have formed rich connections to some other places over the years. Cambridge MA, where I lived for six years of college and divinity school. Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where my sons and their families live. Rome. The Holy Land. Paris. And, of course, here in Dayton, where I have lived for more than forty years.

As anybody my age knows, those iconic places of my childhood no longer exist, except inside me, where they continue to resonate. And in resonating, they attune me to the importance of place--any place.

Because I have experienced and still experience their power, I pay attention to the places I find myself in. I notice the impact places have on me, how they affect me. I relish place, feeling-smelling-tasting as well as looking.

I like to take pictures of details and corners, things that capture the distinctiveness of a particular place experienced at a particular time. And then I like to spend time with those pictures, savoring again the place and my experience of it.

Detail of a gate, Vatican City.

When I have the opportunity, I try to create welcoming, peaceful places. I like to fill them with things that have specific meaning, things that resonate for me, and I hope will resonate, albeit in a different way, for others who enter there.

My two places of deep connection no longer exist, but they continue to teach me much about how to connect with place, how to be a body in space and time, and savor that experience. And I am grateful.