Tales of Change

Shy turtle lives in a little pool beneath a bridge above Sacate Creek. If I’m lucky and quick, I can glimpse him basking in the sun on a flat rock that is shaped like the continent of Africa. It’s his chosen landscape, his predictable spot, but as soon as he senses my nearness, he splashes back into the pool and vanishes. I saw him for a moment yesterday.

I also observed a pair of hawks cavorting in the sky and heard their raucous squeals, and I watched a coyote slinking along a fence—he turned and eyed me guiltily as if up to no good. Meanwhile, the train went by, glinting and clamoring, and the surf receded into a negative tide, and the cliffs were crumbling, and the moon shone through a sky of tufted clouds —altocumulus might be the technical term, but it looked to me like a quilt sewn out of snow drifts and moonbeams. The hills were that electric green they sometimes are, and I walked around in a perpetual state of enchantment. My love for this place is steady through all its moods and seasons, but it has been particularly dazzling lately, almost unbearably beautiful. Shakespeare had some words for it, of course: “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Yesterday we had Sunday lunch, just a few friends around a table, sunlight streaming in. I looked up at the bookshelf and saw my father’s familiar face, a framed photo of him in his soldier’s uniform, taken, as a matter of fact, in Santa Barbara in 1942. Propped up against it was a bumper sticker I had placed there long ago, which says: YOU ARE HERE. And of course he was and always is, and he would have loved this place completely. I try to picture him walking through the orchard or picking lemons from a tree, or here in my kitchen, where there was a tray of lasagna and a platter of Italian cookies and a murmur of conversation and laughter, like music. My father had so little of these kinds of joy. But he is here, here forever in this landscape of love, the landscape of my heart. His words are in pen, his voice in my memory, so many of his dreams fulfilled through me. We shall continue traveling together as we always have.

I find solace in these words of Robert MacFarlane:

“We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”

Everything is colored now by our decision to move soon from this place that has been home for thirty years and a part of Monte’s life for fifty. But didn’t we always understand that we were only passing through? Didn’t we always recognize the ephemeral nature of our lives? I suppose we did, in an abstract sort of way.

This place became my landscape, and it has shaped me in ways I don’t quite understand, ways so profound that I don’t always know where it ends and I begin.

But here’s Robert MacFarlane again:

“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.”

“There is no such thing as memory,” said a friend of mine recently. “It’s all fiction. We each remember things differently; memoir is an invention.” I think that there’s some truth to that, but it doesn’t render it any less real. I walk through this orchard now and remember my daughter as a toddler, helping to plant these trees, or carrying buckets of water to a sycamore seedling that is now 50 feet high. This place was the backdrop of our lives for decades, and there is a story at every turn. Our past selves stroll through the canyon, as do the ghosts of those who were here before us.

I just finished reading a novel called North Woods by Daniel Mason which tells the epic story of a house in New England over the course of several centuries, from the earliest American colonies to the present day, following the fates of its inhabitants across the ages, none of whom, as it turns out, actually leaves the premises. I suppose it will be a little like this for us. We’ll be gone, but we will linger.

And my favorite line in this whole dense novel is this, which is so relevant to me now:

…the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.

I think I can handle the changes, if I am buttressed by the constants. I will invent extravagant memories woven of wonder, and refuse to be sad, because this landscape shaped me into someone grateful and strong, someone who reads this life as a tale of change, not loss.