Place Is Change
Our time in England already feels long-ago, but we have been “home” for barely a week. I am still feeling unmoored and bewildered, and I realize I’ve been saying that a lot lately. But I am also filled with resolve to pivot, shove out the sadness, and focus on my community, good causes, and the beauty around us, right here . Yesterday we saw wild geese in v-formation flying over us, 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 spaces in a way that feels comforting and gentle, and the prism in the window of the room 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 point 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. So 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.
But 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. 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? God is right there.
“I’m not kidding and this is not a metaphor,” Doyle writes. In fact, he asks, if you were the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever was, wouldn’t you be sporting a fantastical hat? (Doyle 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 his essay collection, 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 the tiny, dwindled way of being old, but she was clear and conversational. 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 very 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 had a daughter nearby and we were able to summon her by phone and wait until she arrived to drive 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, cleaned him up a bit and helped him feel secure. He 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 were 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 sort of heartwarming, a mishap with a silver lining.
Then the daughter drove up and went into the house to retrieve her father’s walker. It was a sturdy, compact one that she could easily load into her car—his portable, “going-to-town” walker. And on the back, impossible to miss, was a bright, pasted-on bumper sticker that said TRUMP. My heart sank. I thought I had met the dearest old folks; it was dissonant to glimpse this proclamation of allegiance to the cult.
Would we have withheld our care and kindness had we known? Never. Absolutely not. As a local clergyman told me recently, “We are all God’s children. And this area is not red or blue. It’s purple.”
My fear is that there are toxic dyes and brazen lies bleeding into that purple, which may prove fatal to the body of our state. But I’m beginning to think that the most effective antidote is to stay unwaveringly true to what is right and decent, not preaching, but doing.
By now it was dark, and we were walking our bikes home. “They’re just old,” said Monte. “Probably lifelong Republicans. They don’t know what it really means.”
I suppose he’s right.
Coincidentally, I read an essay a few days later by Rebecca Solnit, called “How Big Should Your Tent Be?” which sort of talks about accepting imperfections and working with what we have, not what we wish was out there. People do come to new realizations and change their minds. “I can at least not be an unwelcoming committee when there’s a chance to shift the balance in our favor,” she writes.
She quotes Anand Gridharadas, who wrote a book about persuasion, in which he suggests that the lifeblood of free society is the ability to change other people’s minds in order to change things. “Americans increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over,” he warns.
It’s something I need to keep in mind, as shocked and heartbroken as I might be by some of what a bumper sticker represents. And I may not be quite ready yet to turn my anger into forgiveness, but I can see that it is not helpful to hold onto it. Maybe there’s a road to revelation, rather than revolution. Maybe finding worthy, constructive causes and diligently working is a way forward, leading by example. Filling the local food bank, for example, or tutoring kids, or playing what music is in us…
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 us, and not letting go of that light. It’s about dancing with contradictions and being worthy of the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever was.