Place Is Change
Our time in England already feels long-ago, but we have been “home” for barely a week, still feeling unmoored and bewildered, although I seem to say that a lot. I am filled with resolve to pivot, shove out the sadness and focus on my community here, good causes, and the fact that we saw wild geese in v-formation flying over us yesterday, and a persimmon tree in the backyard is alight with orange fruit, and the mountains are beginning to feel like familiar friends.
As for the state of our nation, the words for this moment are betrayal and dismay, but I have discovered that the morning light in this new house fills the empty rooms in a way that feels comforting and gentle, and the prism in the window of the place I call my study is casting multitudes of rainbows on the wall. Outside, a white moon left over from the night before lingers above the branches of an oak tree.
I recently came upon a quote by the late English author J.A. Baker, in which he said, “Place is change. It is motion killed by the mind and preserved in the amber of memory.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I find my footing here. What is place, after all, if not an ever-shifting venue? I have begun to think that the only still place is inside of me, and there may be comfort in elements of the landscape I have loved, but there’s nothing out there to hold onto. I am dusting off my inner compass, reaffirming the scaffolding of core character that holds me up, trying to stay steady while everything around me swirls.
Happiness happens. It comes in little bursts and blossoms. Dear friends came over for dinner a few nights ago, just the four of us at a borrowed card table, but first there was a walk at dusk, our favorite time of day. I went to a coffee shop on Sunday morning where talented locals were performing in a backyard open mic session—and people making music is very good news. A few days ago we were treated to an onscreen visit from the kids in England, and glimpses of our grandchildren, despite them being suddenly so far away again, brought a sense of joy that was almost three-dimensional.
It made me think of a little essay by Brian Doyle titled “God” in which a school bus carrying kindergarten children slows down for a stop, and yes, “God was six girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat…” This is something I completely understand. What better way to restore one’s faith in this “blistering perfect and terrible world” than to behold the light of seven smiling children, one of them in a celebratory hat?
“I’m not kidding and this is not a metaphor,” writes Doyle, who died at the age of sixty in 2017 after a bout with brain cancer. (And if you are looking for a playful, spirit-lifting book of faith and grace and wonder, I recommend One Long River of Song.)
An odd thing happened a few nights ago. Monte and I set out for an experimental bike ride as twilight approached. I have a hip problem now and this is hard for me, but I decided to give it a go. We hadn’t gone far when Monte noticed water trickling and puddling from someone’s yard, and he turned to see an elderly man lying on the ground near his house with a hose in his hand. Monte stopped his bike and called out: “Do you need some help?” The man answered, yes.
We walked over and the old guy was alert but shaky, scraped, and bleeding, his shoes off and his socks soaking wet. I turned off the hose while Monte lifted him onto a seat. He said his wife was inside and he’d been calling to her, but she didn’t hear him. He thought he had been on the ground for an hour.
So my job now was to enter their house calling her name. I wandered through the hallway and shouted into rooms and finally reached her in the rear of the dimly lit house. She was old in that shrunken way of being old, and she leaned onto a wheeled walker and followed me around until I found the correct doorway to the place in the yard where Monte was tending to her husband.
It was all so serendipitous. Normally, we would never have been going by this house. Who knows how long the man would have been lying there as night came? And it was also like a peek into our own not-too-distant future. It is all too easy to imagine being on the ground, unable to get up. (We think about this a lot lately; it’s one of the reasons we moved from the Ranch to this more convenient and manageable situation.)
In any case, it turned out that the elderly couple have a daughter nearby and we were able to summon her by phone and wait until she arrived to take her father to the hospital. In the meantime, I watched Monte being the person I love, so competent and caring. He checked the man’s abrasions, helped him feel secure, told him how he had once found his own father on the ground like that.
And I learned a little about these people, who had long histories in the community. They seemed lovely and gracious, and undoubtedly full of stories. We told them we live nearby and we’d check in on them and be their friends. I imagined bringing them cookies and casseroles and looking at their photos and helping them to feel less alone. It was all so very heartwarming.
Then the daughter drove up and went into the house to retrieve her father’s walker, a small one that she could load into her car, sort of his portable, going-to-town walker. And on the back, impossible to miss, there was a bright, pasted-on bumper sticker that said TRUMP.
My heart sank. I thought I had met the sweetest old folks who were going to be our new friends and discovered that they proudly proclaimed their loyalty to a cult. I felt sickened and disappointed. Would we have withheld our care and kindness had we known? Never. Absolutely not. But something dissonant and disturbing had now been signaled, and in light of what is happening, this would henceforth be a hurdle. Because when fundamental evil is involved, it is more than a difference in political opinion, and I cannot comprehend how good people can justify their allegiance to the brazen cruelty, chaos, and corruption we are seeing.
By now it was dark, and we walked our bikes home. “They’re just old,” said Monte.“They don’t know what it really means.” I suppose he’s right.
And I’m not sure yet what I have learned from this or how to navigate, but it seems to reflect something significant about this little town and our country in general, about the universals of getting old, about the ambiguities and shifting nature of place, and about knowing what is constant and steady within, and not letting go of that thread, about dancing with contradictions, and being worthy of the imagination that dreamed up everything that ever was.