Exploring My Place (pretty vague title just now: Growing Home???)

I was walking down to Hollywood Video last night. I’d seen the first bit of "National Treasure" on some cable channel and decided to avoid the commercials. On a typical Saturday night, traffic is snarled at the corner 2nd Avenue NE and 45th Street N. The cars leaving the video store lot and trying to get into Dick’s, a local hamburger joint, make getting onto the street where I live a challenge. Even so, I was thinking on that walk about what a great Seattle neighborhood Wallingford is. In the past twenty-four hours, I had walked to get groceries and takeout and a meeting with some friends. I regularly walk to book and computer stores, a major university library, a half-dozen pho shops, and a YMCA. On a clear day, my neighborhood walks and bike rides bring me to views of Mount Rainer, the Olympic Mountains, the Cascades, downtown Seattle and Lake Union; I can pick from three largish parks and a university campus if I am in the mood for green space. All these thoughts ran through my head as I found my DVD (it was free) and headed for the Shell station to pick up some Milk Duds for my wife. As I crossed 2nd, for some reason I thought, “we cannot really afford to live in this delightful place.” A one-bedroom bungalow a half-block away recently sold for above its $415,000 asking price. I love this place but cannot imagine being a homeowner, not sure if we will be able to stay long-term.

Perhaps I think too much. I admit that I worry about just how I inhabit the place I live in. Since 1981, I have changed addresses at least once every three years; I have lived in nine different counties, for as few as three but only as many as five years. I suppose my story is not that different from many of my peers, highly educated professional people who have moved around the country in pursuit of degrees and careers. But my story makes me uncomfortable. My parents have lived in the same house since 1970, and my mother’s parents lived on the same farm in the same house from 1932 until they died (1995 and 1997). My folks know the place where they live, know the streams and springs that feed their well, know when the cowslips will bloom and when the weather will change. My grandparents knew the actual birds that returned to nest in houses or trees each season; that is, they knew specific birds, could actually pick out a finch or red-tail hawk with the binoculars that always hung by the west-facing picture window. My grandfather put in that window the 1970s for the purpose of being able to see more birds. They both died on that 120 acre place in Hollaway township.

Now in Seattle, I am still trying to distinguish Douglas and Silver fir, much less the various maples native to the northwest. I know the streets in my neighborhood and the routes I ride on my bike. I can manage downtown and know enough to avoid the ‘burbs (they make me unsettled, a little queasy). But my sense of place feels anemic compared to the one held by my people. I walk to stores (many of them national chains) but do not have a feel for the soil or the fauna. Indeed, this place is all so built up and (high-end) convenient that knowing soil and fauna feels like criminal trespass. I am acquainted with my neighbors, at least enough to say hello, and my wife and I have had one or two neighbors over for dinner a few times. Our next-door neighbor watches our cats when we fly back to Wisconsin for visits—she’s from Madison; we look after her dog when she is gone (to more exotic locales usually). We have a connection with her, but it is one that really comes from a different place. So I live in a place that I love but know only it the most shallow way. I wonder what the implications are of admitting this. My parents know who they are in part because they know the place where they live. Who am I?

The minute I write that, I wonder if this is all just nostalgia. I have studied ecology and human community, have taught “learning communities.” I may not have a deep sense of belonging connected to some of the places I have lived, but I know what it means to feel “at home.” My feeling of home has to do with people, with conversations that get into meaningful topics, with afternoons on the trails around the glacier at Mt. Rainer or on the roads through Discovery Park or along County C through Ozaukee County as it parallels the Lake Michigan shore. That feeling of home can feel as intense as my childhood connection to the maple forests of Iron County, Wisconsin, but is it? I wonder. Can my transitory, relational sense of place nurture my own growth and carry me into a well-lived life the way that Hollaway Township did my grandparents. Does place do that for anyone in the urban and suburban U.S.? Because my own intuitions about place are skewed by nostalgia and guilt and because my culture is not known these days as one that cares for or about places (we care deeply about “place” when that word aims at status but not, I think, otherwise), my wonder is tinged with concern. I cannot, it seems, make a claim without hedging.

In the coming weeks, I want to explore my place in the world.