If you want to find out what the potential is for adding solar to the roof of your building, check out this way cool tool that will tell you what is possible and what the costs and payback period is...And you might find it interesting to see what is possible at FIT!
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
Another voice on building sustainability
This is an article written by Bill McKibben and posted on the Orion Magazine website. As I have said before, they are a good group, the articles are terrific and the photography is a moment's respite from our lives. You may also want to check out the piece on drought and irrigation on this month's site.
Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?
Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?
Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.
Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.
But last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.
And what works on the farm works elsewhere too. Think about our energy future—the phrase that engineers like to use now is “distributed generation.” Since our old fuels were dense in BTUs and concentrated in a few locations, it made sense to site a few giant generating stations where coal or uranium could easily be brought and burned. But the logic of sun and wind is exactly the opposite: millions of rooftops and ridgelines producing power. You can do it in cities as easily as in the country—new satellite and airplane mapping of New York City’s five boroughs showed that the city’s rooftops could provide half its electricity. If you can do that in New York, imagine Shaker Heights, not to mention Phoenix. And once you’ve done it, you’ve got something practical and local: an interconnected grid where everyone brings something and takes something away. A farmers’ market in electrons.
Many of us get a preview of life in the age of small and many when we sit down at our computers each day. Fifteen years ago we still depended on a handful of TV networks and newspaper conglomerates to define our world for us; now we have a farmers’ market in ideas. We all add to the flow with each Facebook post, and we can find almost infinite sources of information. It’s reshaping the way we see the world—not, of course, without some trauma (from the hours wasted answering e-mail to the death of too much good, old-school journalism). All these transitions will be traumatic to one extent or another, since they are so very big. We’re reversing the trend of generations.
But the general direction seems to me increasingly clear. Health care? In place of a few huge, high-tech hospitals dispensing the most expensive care possible, all the data suggest we’d be healthier with lots of primary and preventive care from physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners in our neighborhoods. Banking? Instead of putting more than half our assets in half a dozen money-center banks that devote themselves to baroque financial instruments, we need capital closer to home, where loan officers have some sense for gauging risk and need.
Your average state or city leader could help push change in those directions: small investments in, say, slaughterhouses and canneries will help local farmers diversify. New zoning regulations can make rooftop solar quicker and easier to install. Higher reserve requirements will move money from Wall Street’s casinos back to Main Street’s banks. None of them will produce utopia—we will still have endless problems, but they’ll be more limited. A careless local farmer can still sicken his customers, but he can’t sicken millions of them at once. A corrupt banker can wreak havoc in his community, but not so much havoc that it topples the financial system. Problems will stay problems, instead of ramifying into disasters. If a hailstorm wrecks my solar panels, I’ve got an issue, but it’s not blacking out the East Coast.
All economic life is a bet—many small wagers at decent odds won’t make anyone a billionaire, but they should keep most of us out of the poorhouse. And that’s both the virtue and the trouble with this transition. The virtue is obvious; the problem is that there are always a few people determined to hit the jackpot. In our world, most of those people are not actually persons—we call them corporations. But their power over our democracy is very real, and on the farm and on the trading floor and in the hospital ward they’re doing their very best to block the transitions we need. Their money, earned under the old bigger-is-better paradigm, gives them great power to block change: just look at how skillfully the fossil fuel industry has used the Tea Party to stifle legislation that would speed the transition to renewable energy. Watch Big Ag write the next Farm Bill—it won’t be pretty. Big Pharma would happily keep our current medical system, never mind that it’s bankrupting us all even as we fall further behind other nations on everything from life expectancy to infant mortality.
It’s possible they can delay the transition too long—the physics and chemistry of climate change, for instance, demand quicker change than many of our systems can easily manage. But all the money in the world can’t, in the end, hold back history. It’s heading toward something different and new and interesting.
Or many many somethings, each of them small and beautiful.
Small Change
The Era of Small and Many
Reversing the trend of generations
by Bill McKibben
Published in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion magazine
Painting: Suzanne Stryk
Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?
Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?
Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.
Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.
But last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.
And what works on the farm works elsewhere too. Think about our energy future—the phrase that engineers like to use now is “distributed generation.” Since our old fuels were dense in BTUs and concentrated in a few locations, it made sense to site a few giant generating stations where coal or uranium could easily be brought and burned. But the logic of sun and wind is exactly the opposite: millions of rooftops and ridgelines producing power. You can do it in cities as easily as in the country—new satellite and airplane mapping of New York City’s five boroughs showed that the city’s rooftops could provide half its electricity. If you can do that in New York, imagine Shaker Heights, not to mention Phoenix. And once you’ve done it, you’ve got something practical and local: an interconnected grid where everyone brings something and takes something away. A farmers’ market in electrons.
Many of us get a preview of life in the age of small and many when we sit down at our computers each day. Fifteen years ago we still depended on a handful of TV networks and newspaper conglomerates to define our world for us; now we have a farmers’ market in ideas. We all add to the flow with each Facebook post, and we can find almost infinite sources of information. It’s reshaping the way we see the world—not, of course, without some trauma (from the hours wasted answering e-mail to the death of too much good, old-school journalism). All these transitions will be traumatic to one extent or another, since they are so very big. We’re reversing the trend of generations.
But the general direction seems to me increasingly clear. Health care? In place of a few huge, high-tech hospitals dispensing the most expensive care possible, all the data suggest we’d be healthier with lots of primary and preventive care from physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners in our neighborhoods. Banking? Instead of putting more than half our assets in half a dozen money-center banks that devote themselves to baroque financial instruments, we need capital closer to home, where loan officers have some sense for gauging risk and need.
Your average state or city leader could help push change in those directions: small investments in, say, slaughterhouses and canneries will help local farmers diversify. New zoning regulations can make rooftop solar quicker and easier to install. Higher reserve requirements will move money from Wall Street’s casinos back to Main Street’s banks. None of them will produce utopia—we will still have endless problems, but they’ll be more limited. A careless local farmer can still sicken his customers, but he can’t sicken millions of them at once. A corrupt banker can wreak havoc in his community, but not so much havoc that it topples the financial system. Problems will stay problems, instead of ramifying into disasters. If a hailstorm wrecks my solar panels, I’ve got an issue, but it’s not blacking out the East Coast.
All economic life is a bet—many small wagers at decent odds won’t make anyone a billionaire, but they should keep most of us out of the poorhouse. And that’s both the virtue and the trouble with this transition. The virtue is obvious; the problem is that there are always a few people determined to hit the jackpot. In our world, most of those people are not actually persons—we call them corporations. But their power over our democracy is very real, and on the farm and on the trading floor and in the hospital ward they’re doing their very best to block the transitions we need. Their money, earned under the old bigger-is-better paradigm, gives them great power to block change: just look at how skillfully the fossil fuel industry has used the Tea Party to stifle legislation that would speed the transition to renewable energy. Watch Big Ag write the next Farm Bill—it won’t be pretty. Big Pharma would happily keep our current medical system, never mind that it’s bankrupting us all even as we fall further behind other nations on everything from life expectancy to infant mortality.
It’s possible they can delay the transition too long—the physics and chemistry of climate change, for instance, demand quicker change than many of our systems can easily manage. But all the money in the world can’t, in the end, hold back history. It’s heading toward something different and new and interesting.
Or many many somethings, each of them small and beautiful.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Sustainability rituals
Fall is here. I have been going through a familiar counterpoint to the
Spring cleaning cycle. It is the harvest of course, and the 'putting up'
of produce from the garden. But it is more.
Yesterday, I 'canned' 5 quarts of applesauce from the tree in the backyard. The apples are yellow, and sweet this year. Sometimes they are only edible after a frost, and taste like Granny Smiths. This year they are more like a yellow delicious. I share in a statewide bounty and have filled a plastic milk crate and three 27 gallon litter buckets, as well as a 10 gallon Rubbermaid container with drops and the proverbial low hanging fruit. A neighbor and friend has made several quarts with apples from the same tree, and I have yet to pick any of the apples that are out of easy reach. These are the blessings of sun, and soil picked out of rock-hard landscape a century or more ago.
I 'canned' 10 pints of chutney made with apples, onions and green tomatoes and huge amounts of spices. It won't be ready for another month, so I have to hope that the 3 pounds of still green Sungold tomatoes and the apples will be happy partners when I open a jar at dinner beside the wood stove.
I threw out some of my earlier efforts at 'canning', from before I knew to label everything with its contents and a date. There was rhubarb, one jar of that same chutney and a few jars of applesauce. Once open, I realized that they were probably made two years ago when a friend was visiting because one bottle of applesauce had a tiny stick of cinnamon that she had included in the ones she made. I wish I had labeled it because it was a good weekend with friends, and that tiny cinnamon stick was a marker.
There are more things to be done. The oregano and rosemary are thriving but need to be transplanted to pots as it is supposed to freeze tonight.The brussels sprouts will be ok in the ground, but the rest will be gone. The dahlias will be blackened, the nasturtiums limp. I got an extra week out of the garden as I thought we would lose it all over the weekend with rain and very cold temperatures, but there has been a reprieve. And I am feeling grateful for the slight extension on the fall. The leaves have not yet peaked. The grass is still green beneath the leaf fall. The mushrooms that remain behind, in the circle of leaves where I picked last week, are still growing, though the Blewits that were intensely crayola blue have now gone to mauve and the caps are curling up rather than down. I have some remarkable spore prints from these and what may be a 'Xerula' that was growing beside a freshly cut maple tree. And I feel as though there is time yet. Winter is not yet here, though we have taken the air conditioners out and have ordered two truck loads of wood to add to our substantial pile in the garage.
I have swept, and peeled apples, and chopped onions and tomatoes. I have washed dozens of 'canning' jars, sterilized them, moved the antique plate set we bought at auction into the rubbermaid bucket in the basement. I have picked potatoes, made spore prints, brought in inside plants that were on vacation beneath the maple tree. And the garden is about to be done. With the ending of the season, I will turn to spinning fiber rather than gardening. I will drag carts of wood from the stacked pile to the wood boxes, and will continue to sweep the debris out the door, only now it will be wood rather than grasses and leaf litter.
This is an important time for me. I love Spring, and it has its rituals, but there is something about these last days before the cold settles in to the mornings, when bare feet on the kitchen floor is unthinkable; there is something about this time before cocoa and tea from a new tea pot, before wind that howls outside, before low sun disappearing early in the day; there is something in this I love. And it centers me. I don't talk much. There is no music on the radio. There is a sound of Fall that I listen for, as there is that cool edge to the dusk before the light is gone. And I find myself cleaning and washing and packing and sweeping and watching the leaves scatter before the winter.
Intermission (time for a glass of wine or some chocolate ...)
I am struck by how near sustainability is to me here. I compost the apple cores and peelings, the dried flowers that graced the garden a few days earlier. It is easy to walk outside between the lilac and the pear tree and dump them into the pile beside the cemetery wall. It is clear that the thermostat is linked inextricably to the use of the wood stove, and the mornings are cold because it is both too expensive and inappropriate to use the oil when there is a supply of sustainable wood from a local friend. I will take my trash to the dump on Saturday with bins allotted to recyclables, but the glass that was once pulverized to be used in roads as a mix with asphalt, is no longer collected because people complained that overtime, the asphalt wore away and the broken glass was damaging their tires.
But in the city, these are distant concerns. I am always carrying too much to walk or take the subway to work. I wait for the bus, but that can add an hour or more in waiting time to the journey. There are no compost piles; there is no thermostat on the pre-war radiators - just a valve to be turned on or off. And my mother (now 91) is always cold, so I swelter. I am used to keeping the thermostat around 50 and supplementing with the wood stove. In her apartment it is often 80 or hotter.
So how do we make change in places that are disconnected? Not so much from the natural landscape, but from the patterns and rituals of unsustainable practice? In some communities, there are movements to bring composting back. A colleague and her husband have just gotten the other 800 apartments in their coop to agree to sub-metering their energy use. Will Allen got a McArthur genius award for the work he has done in urban green markets in working class and poor areas of Milwaukee. But these are exceptions, worthy of note. We need to switch the balance so the thermostat-free apartment, private-car urban transit, energy-unconscious coop is "the exception that proves the rule" of sustainable communities as far as we can see.
Sometimes the distance seems too great for hope. I think that's why people try to solve the problem with technological and legislative means. I keep thinking that it isn't technology or legislation that will save us, but us. What's the phrase: "the fault is in us, not in our stars"?
Robert Frost wrote:
I am going to take a walk in the leaves for a lunch time break and then I will be back to work. And tonight I will peel more apples for sauce while the leaves lie "dark and deep."
Yesterday, I 'canned' 5 quarts of applesauce from the tree in the backyard. The apples are yellow, and sweet this year. Sometimes they are only edible after a frost, and taste like Granny Smiths. This year they are more like a yellow delicious. I share in a statewide bounty and have filled a plastic milk crate and three 27 gallon litter buckets, as well as a 10 gallon Rubbermaid container with drops and the proverbial low hanging fruit. A neighbor and friend has made several quarts with apples from the same tree, and I have yet to pick any of the apples that are out of easy reach. These are the blessings of sun, and soil picked out of rock-hard landscape a century or more ago.
I 'canned' 10 pints of chutney made with apples, onions and green tomatoes and huge amounts of spices. It won't be ready for another month, so I have to hope that the 3 pounds of still green Sungold tomatoes and the apples will be happy partners when I open a jar at dinner beside the wood stove.
I threw out some of my earlier efforts at 'canning', from before I knew to label everything with its contents and a date. There was rhubarb, one jar of that same chutney and a few jars of applesauce. Once open, I realized that they were probably made two years ago when a friend was visiting because one bottle of applesauce had a tiny stick of cinnamon that she had included in the ones she made. I wish I had labeled it because it was a good weekend with friends, and that tiny cinnamon stick was a marker.
There are more things to be done. The oregano and rosemary are thriving but need to be transplanted to pots as it is supposed to freeze tonight.The brussels sprouts will be ok in the ground, but the rest will be gone. The dahlias will be blackened, the nasturtiums limp. I got an extra week out of the garden as I thought we would lose it all over the weekend with rain and very cold temperatures, but there has been a reprieve. And I am feeling grateful for the slight extension on the fall. The leaves have not yet peaked. The grass is still green beneath the leaf fall. The mushrooms that remain behind, in the circle of leaves where I picked last week, are still growing, though the Blewits that were intensely crayola blue have now gone to mauve and the caps are curling up rather than down. I have some remarkable spore prints from these and what may be a 'Xerula' that was growing beside a freshly cut maple tree. And I feel as though there is time yet. Winter is not yet here, though we have taken the air conditioners out and have ordered two truck loads of wood to add to our substantial pile in the garage.
I have swept, and peeled apples, and chopped onions and tomatoes. I have washed dozens of 'canning' jars, sterilized them, moved the antique plate set we bought at auction into the rubbermaid bucket in the basement. I have picked potatoes, made spore prints, brought in inside plants that were on vacation beneath the maple tree. And the garden is about to be done. With the ending of the season, I will turn to spinning fiber rather than gardening. I will drag carts of wood from the stacked pile to the wood boxes, and will continue to sweep the debris out the door, only now it will be wood rather than grasses and leaf litter.
This is an important time for me. I love Spring, and it has its rituals, but there is something about these last days before the cold settles in to the mornings, when bare feet on the kitchen floor is unthinkable; there is something about this time before cocoa and tea from a new tea pot, before wind that howls outside, before low sun disappearing early in the day; there is something in this I love. And it centers me. I don't talk much. There is no music on the radio. There is a sound of Fall that I listen for, as there is that cool edge to the dusk before the light is gone. And I find myself cleaning and washing and packing and sweeping and watching the leaves scatter before the winter.
Intermission (time for a glass of wine or some chocolate ...)
I am struck by how near sustainability is to me here. I compost the apple cores and peelings, the dried flowers that graced the garden a few days earlier. It is easy to walk outside between the lilac and the pear tree and dump them into the pile beside the cemetery wall. It is clear that the thermostat is linked inextricably to the use of the wood stove, and the mornings are cold because it is both too expensive and inappropriate to use the oil when there is a supply of sustainable wood from a local friend. I will take my trash to the dump on Saturday with bins allotted to recyclables, but the glass that was once pulverized to be used in roads as a mix with asphalt, is no longer collected because people complained that overtime, the asphalt wore away and the broken glass was damaging their tires.
But in the city, these are distant concerns. I am always carrying too much to walk or take the subway to work. I wait for the bus, but that can add an hour or more in waiting time to the journey. There are no compost piles; there is no thermostat on the pre-war radiators - just a valve to be turned on or off. And my mother (now 91) is always cold, so I swelter. I am used to keeping the thermostat around 50 and supplementing with the wood stove. In her apartment it is often 80 or hotter.
So how do we make change in places that are disconnected? Not so much from the natural landscape, but from the patterns and rituals of unsustainable practice? In some communities, there are movements to bring composting back. A colleague and her husband have just gotten the other 800 apartments in their coop to agree to sub-metering their energy use. Will Allen got a McArthur genius award for the work he has done in urban green markets in working class and poor areas of Milwaukee. But these are exceptions, worthy of note. We need to switch the balance so the thermostat-free apartment, private-car urban transit, energy-unconscious coop is "the exception that proves the rule" of sustainable communities as far as we can see.
Sometimes the distance seems too great for hope. I think that's why people try to solve the problem with technological and legislative means. I keep thinking that it isn't technology or legislation that will save us, but us. What's the phrase: "the fault is in us, not in our stars"?
Robert Frost wrote:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I am going to take a walk in the leaves for a lunch time break and then I will be back to work. And tonight I will peel more apples for sauce while the leaves lie "dark and deep."
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Magic Mushrooms
A short post today...For the second time in as many weeks, I was puttering around the house in my sweats - the equivalent of my jammies, not prepared for company, when there was a call at the door. I didn't have time to run upstairs and put on real clothes, and because I was feeling poorly the night before, and slept in, I must have looked a sight! Anyway, it was my friend David, with someone whose name I had heard before, from the town of 500 people a bit east of here. He had a grocery bag (or is it a sack?) full of purplish mushrooms, picked up the hill behind the barn. Edible. Cool. We talked mushrooms for about a half hour. Walked over to the compost pile. Nothing there. But we walked up to where he had picked these babies for dinner, and found another type he couldn't identify and chose not to try to eat. He exhorted me to read and test and educate myself, but I am reluctant to be my own guinea pig. Still I will be making spore prints with these two types later today.
I am struck at the way "learning" comes in the door here, or appears along the side of the road. The Harvard educator John Stilgo has written "Outside Lies Magic" and he exhorts his students to walk and look, and see and listen. He asks them to examine manhole covers and the way the grass is patterned after a mowing, and the color of smoke from a chimney against clouds or blue sky--clues to what is being burned for heat. Too often I spend entire days in my desk chair and the only learning I do is on a single screen.
There are millions of others, who spend their time at the desk or in transit between desk and television and desk again, who get their information from the screen. They don't feel the cold, because they have central heating. They don't sweat in summer because their homes, and cars and workplaces are air-conditioned. How are they to understand climate change and its impacts until a Hurricane wipes out their farm stand at Union Square's green market? And then, they work around the loss of red peppers with something imported from Uruguay.
We have been talking for years now, about the need to design the workplace and the community to encourage people to walk, because we are an increasingly obese population. I am struck that we need to design to encourage people to walk, so that they can begin to see the magic. And hear it. And taste it. And feel it.
I am thinking I need to get dressed earlier in the day, and walk, or put on a pot of tea for visitors. If you are in the neighborhood, please stop in.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Home...
So I have thought about a posting and debated about what to say here in this public forum. I prefer to think that it is my colleagues in the enterprise who are reading this. It is to them that I am speaking here. So colleagues, here is a long post... I am testing the waters on a chapter for a book I am writing. Do not feel you need to read it. But if you do, please let me know what you think. Whether it resonates. Whether you recognize yourself in any of these images...
Here goes...
CHAPTER 1: THE MEANINGS OF “HOME”:
“..where I’m from.”
“Where are you from?” Such a simple question. When we meet a stranger, names exchanged, we gauge shoes, hair style, logos and piercings, assess the rhythms of speech and idioms: are you from here? Do I know that accent? What are the places that have shaped you?
Why does it matter, this “from”?
Once we didn’t need to ask. We never traveled far from the hearth. Those we met at market or on the street knew us, our siblings, parents, grandparents. They waved and went about their business, knowing that like the sun’s rising, and the cold that follows a clear winter sky, we would pass the day at our appointed tasks. The hay would be cut, the papers filed, the children walked to school. We knew who to call when someone was sick or the barn was burning; we knew who had whiskey hidden in the basement or barn, and who was sleeping in someone else’s arms.
When I arrived in this tiny town of 800 in a valley between mountains, there were still many whose grandparents had grown up here. The fire company’s volunteers were descendants of the families buried in the “old” cemetery where there’s no longer any room. The grange put on a popular “country show” and sponsored the Memorial Day parade which drew people from miles away to sit on lawns and watch the passing children’s floats and the military vehicles and ambulance squad trucks from communities an hour’s drive away.
Ten years later, the children who stay are the anomaly, and there is only one dairy farm left, where seven farmers used to send their cows to graze the high pastures. People still greet each other at Town Meeting every March when the old-timers and “newcomers” who came here in the back-to-the-land era of 40 years ago debate the highway and school budgets. But there are fewer gatherings at the firehouse when the third and fourth generation natives sit beside the new parents who came “from away,” and the Memorial Day parade is a shadow of what it once was.
“Old timers like me don’t see any point in votin’ anymore,” my friend said. “They keep on raisin’ taxes for the school and that road. Used to be hard work meant you used a shovel; now they just sit up there in that bucket loader and call it a day.”
I live in an anachronism, where the old timers see the second graders making power point presentations in school on computers paid for with the taxes on hard work plowing and boiling sap for maple syrup or working on an industrial assembly line. And those plants too are closing. The orchard that used to supply an income for dozens of town residents has been abandoned by “flatlander” owners whose interest has moved on; the trees are girdled by rodents and their house is for sale, along with 50 percent of the housing stock which is owned by those who come here only on weekends or to ski or for the changing of the leaves. At the same time, the tiny library is booming, with story hour and old movies, knitting circle and a women’s financial group. The participants are mostly transplants who have come here for the “here” here.
This town may be the exception or it may prove the rule. If I know my neighbors, exchange gifts at Christmas and we greet each other over the tomatoes in the garden or at the post office where maintaining a postal box is an excuse for social gathering, there is less visiting at the kitchen table. If the pot luck is a high art, one of the seniors just moved to her daughter’s home, for reasons unspoken. Perhaps it was because there were no customers for the braided rugs that must have once paid the taxes, or because there was no one to look in on her with her sons and daughter-in-law working out of the area, or perhaps she was just lonely without the circle of senior women who met twice a week to lift free weights and gossip. Once she was a farm wife isolated by an abusive husband, gathering water at the trough in the morning before the cows came down from the high pasture to be milked. She had the rituals then, of getting the kids off to school and keeping the house warm in winter. Now she was alone again, and there were no rituals of baking pies on a wood stove twice a day, and washing diapers for four babies, in the buckets of water carried by hand.
All around this tiny town, there are larger places where we do not know the strangers we pass, or even those with whom we share the places we live and work. We have no roles on which our neighbors depend. We have not become firemen because our father and his father were firemen; we do not know the sound of danger in dry grass. We are not the teachers who taught multiplication tables to the Smith or Jones boy; we will not tutor the “slow” ones after school. Few of us are dairymen who can tell from the way a cow holds its head, whether the calf will be stillborn. Few are farmers or gatherers who know when to harvest the crops for root cellaring through a lean winter; there are no seasons at the supermarket. Salad is sewn and reaped without the benefit of soil, under glass and lights, and kiwi fruit harvested in New Zealand spreads sterile seeds on our melamine, fiberglass, glassteel, polycarbonate lunch tray in New York. We are as rootless as the food that is raised without soil under lights that defy the passages of day and night.
We will need to renegotiate who we are. When I graduated from high school, my kindergarten teachers were at the “school assembly.” But now there are few communities where anyone will remember either our exploits in school or the family skeletons. Truth be told that is freeing, not to be compared to your older brother or sister; the world is full of possibilities, or so we believe when we are young. We can be stockbrokers or architects, policy advocates, biochemists or CFOs. But what we gain in mobility we lose in connection. Our work will be inexplicable to those outside our profession, and disconnected from the places in which we live. Our identities will be drawn from something other than the land and the communities in which we were born. When once our children knew the tools of our trade and carried them to “show and tell,” what will we have to show for our work now, other than an i-pad?
“Where did you grow up?” we ask on the first day of school. Many of us know no such thing. We are migrants, refugees of many chalk dusted school rooms and boy scout campfires. We will be husbands and wives, until half of us divorce. We will be workers, until we are laid off or move on to leadership roles, where we are judged by our understanding of globalization rather than our wisdom about local markets and vernacular patterns. We will specialize in the place-less. We will become wizards of the ur-place, the universal, the utopia which is literally the no-place. Our cities and towns will look more and more the same. Whether Detroit or Dubuque, our places will reflect the common denominator determined by traffic and trade rather than tradition.
In the countryside, new species will take up residence in our soil and water, carried in our produce boxes and on our sneakered feet, on our tires and boat engines until the vernacular landscape is swallowed alive. In July 2010, NOAA awarded the University of Notre Dame, $2.5 million to study and develop countermeasures to invasive species in the Great Lakes. The announcement read, “The Asian carp invasion will play a role in the study... The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, which feed into Lake Michigan, are already teeming with the fish, which were likely released when flooding damaged aquaculture ponds where the fish had been used to eat pond wastes (NOAA Awards $2.5 Million for Research on Invasive Species in the Great Lakes, 2010).” “Feed into Lake Michigan.”
We are eating the seeds of the destruction of our landscapes. We are flooding our villages and towns with an omni-culture that will eat everything of the “here,” of the “home,” leaving only nostalgia for ‘what-once-was’ in its wake.
But that nostalgia is a powerful drug.
At the same time that we aspire to the omni--whether of opportunity or place, of language or popular culture, we conserve landscapes and build historic preservation societies which look backward at a moment in time, cast it in amber, await some genetic process that can clone our history, revivify it, turn it into the Disneyland small town with its walkable streets, safe for what we imagine to be community. Such “new urbanism” rejects the automobile, champions local schools, and work at walkable distances from residences. A main street of small businesses with second story residential and fraternal organizations will be our village heart and we will greet each other over lattes and “take-out Chinese”. One “new town” (now decades old) was designed and built by Disney’s imagineers. In “Celebration,” the marketing pitch is: “There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies...The movie house showed cartoons on Saturday. The grocery store delivered...Remember that place?..It held a magic all its own. The special magic of an American hometown.” (Ross 1999)
There is a template that undergirds the new urbanism of these small towns, and like the cookie cutter dolls of my childhood, we are snapping on the elements of street and school footprint and choosing the porch or Victorian embellishment that mimics something we know only from the movies. We did not grow up with these small towns; we did not grow up knowing how to “visit.” And without a program that will teach us how to come outside on a summer evening, how to suspend our telecommuting / multi-tasking/ Tivo lives, we may not know how to build community anymore, or how to “neighbor.” Arlie Hochschild (19xx) says we’d rather stay at work these days, than come home to the chores that await us, or our neighbors. Or those we married.
The landscape savant, J.B. Jackson wrote a tale of 300 years of the iconic Tinkham family from Puritan settlers in New England who husbanded a parcel of land within sight of the church in 1653 to their 1950s progeny, living in a suburban enclave 12 miles from town, where the landscape itself is altered to meet the needs of irrigation of crops that will never be eaten on the land on which they are grown (Jackson 1953). Philip Ackerman-Leist who has studied homesteading from the inside, says that farmers won’t eat the food produced on their own lands --partly out of awareness of the toxins that keep the pests at bay and partly because we have all become accustomed to the shrink-wrapped out-of-season product on the supermarket shelves (citation).
Vernacular architecture once was built of what grew on our land; we ate what we eked out of poor soils; our communities depended on us for what we were good at, whether carpentry or animal care, and our needs could be filled by what and who we saw in the course of a day’s passing. In the 1950s, our children had no plans to stay where they grew up, nor for that matter, did their parents. Sixty years later, we are building a schizophrenic nation split between a hometown that aspires to be the movie set for Pleasantville, what James Kunstler has called ‘the geography of nowhere,” and the cities whose phallic architecture competes like so many Towers of Babel for futurist status. Will we remember these aeries in Abu Dhabi and Singapore as home? Or will they be exemplars of the omniverse?
And tower of Babel or Celebration, if our places have melded into a single omniverse, our identities are melding too. If our place in society is ambiguous, if we are fungible commodities and our communities have lost the vernacular wisdom of that deep integration in the rhythms of the land, what will be left of “home”? What is it that the new young parents see in this wrinkle in the mountain fabric? What is it that calls to them? And is the tofu, avocado chocolate pie the same as the “ambrosia” of fruit laden jello or boxed macaroni and cheese of the 1950s or the baked beans and apple pies baked by old women whose cool circulation-circumscribed hands make perfect crusts?
“Where are you from?” we ask. The answer comes only after gauging the questioner, and the place we linger to chat. “I am an American,” we say when we are walking Barcelona’s Ramblas; “a New Yorker” at Seattle’s Pike Street Market. “I live on the Upper West Side” an investment broker said to assure me of his interest in socially responsible investments; “my wife is a social worker.” There was some sense that I would know his values, trust his decisions, recognize him as a familiar, in knowing the place he lived, what his wife did for a living. When did we forget that such assurances meant little in the language of the 21st century? No such assurances are needed when we are grounded in place--“I’m from here,” we say. But we have not been grounded in place for a decade now, or longer, since the Wars taught “our boys” about the other side of the pond; since television and the movies and the internet taught us that there really were no boundaries anymore.
Is it this that Tall longs for - a “hot and a cot,” four-square and a roof? She says only that it is a “here” she seeks, distinct, lasting, in her own image. But is it only a “here” that we see in our waking dreams, a curve of earth that shelters us from rain and cold, or is it more that Tall wants--a sense of history on the land and morning ritual, a place that recognizes our step, our head and hip on the bed at night? And just so, is the “from” she seeks, some knowledge of the patterns of house and land, some sense of which corners hold afternoon light and welcome dawn?
What is “here”? What is “home”? Such an obvious question. Not worth a struggle. Look it up in the dictionary and find that it is a house, an apartment, a residence, an abode, a dwelling , habitation, a native place. Home, then, is a physical place, or one we occupy for a time. We can see it if we close our eyes--high-rise apartment building or free-standing structure in a yard, brick or clapboard or aluminum sided, old or new .
It is the place we reside: the street name on the second line of our tax forms; our hometown on the return address of envelopes with mortgage payments, job applications and love letters. But is this what we long for, pray for, pay for? We answer with where we live now or where we were born, where we spent most of our life, or the last place we stayed more than a year. Home is a physical place of course,, but there is, in this most simple of answers, a dissembling. It is the most cursory of replies, focusing on the “where”, the geography of place, the structure, rather than the notion of “home” itself; it says little about what we think of. It says nothing of what we feel.
If home is an address, a geographic and physical place; if it is the backdrop for the photographs in the family album, it is also family--extended or nuclear; birth or blended. It is our husband’s place at the wheel of the car, the place our parents live. It is the place of memory: before the house burned or flooded or crumbled or was sold. It is the place of desire, the “some-day” place: when we’ve saved enough or paid our dues or gotten a job or gotten married or live alone at last. It is harbor and safety; it is prospect and vista. It is a native place, cradle to grave. It is the place to which we feel entitled; it is where our “stuff” is. It is “self.” “Home is where the heart is,” we say when we want to suggest the emotions that ground us. The "hearth" contains the "heart"; the bed, the body; the attic, our dreams. There is some sense in which the home, like the beloved pet, is our companion. We return exhausted at the end of the work day, expecting it to recognize our step, to welcome our head and hip in the bed at night. We dress it for the holidays, leave radios on in our absence, like some conversation to which we will return. We see it as our better nature--our surrogate, standing in for us when we are away. And when we return from travel, we return to our self: “there is no place like home.”
Truth be told, we want much more than a “from” or a “here”. These are words spoken to those who come from further away. “Where are you from?” they will ask as they introduce themselves or stop us for directions. “Here,” we shall say, and that will be enough. But it is not enough, except for the most mobile, the nomad. For these, seeking only a curve of earth as shelter from rain and cold, “here” is as much as can be imagined. With no experience of being “placed,” such nomads will be pushed, as refugees, before those whose imaginations run deeper, grander. They will be pushed before the onslaught of “settlers,” for whom the home is completion, a coming full circle to the place we believe we “belong.” Even the homeless have grander ambitions, according to those who work to place them in inner-city neighborhoods, near social services. They want no shelter, no SRO, nor co-operative housing, but dream, like the settled, of the picket fenced yard and all it represents. With the yard will come the child playing ball outside, and the barbecue. With the yard will come the job from which we can return “home” and the garage, and with the garage will come the car, and with the car, some time to travel: MacDonald’s for Sunday dinner, a place in the country with fresh eggs and tomatoes like when our grandparents were children, or like “Jack and Jill who climbed the hill.” And when we travel, the real purpose will be to come home. Return will be the most important goal of leaving.
What is it that we dream of then? What is it that we see in the photo album of home?
What is your home?
It is not mere architecture, nor the garden displays we point-and-shoot. We want something intimate, something that suggests our individual bonds and patterns. Home will be measured in the crack in the ceiling over the bed, traced with a fingertip each night as we dreamed before we slept. Home will be described in our place in the empty dining room chair after death or divorce. It will be measured in homework done at kitchen counter or on the bed or in the study, and in the ringing of the phone at dinnertime. There is no other word to describe the feeling of disappointment and relief when it is just a familiar voice calling to say hello--no “Publisher’s Clearinghouse,” no collection agent. Home is measured in knowing where the light switch is with our eyes closed.
One friend, that wife of a farmer, who moved in with her daughter, who had no well, who drew the water for the day’s washing and cooking from the cows’ trough before the light was in the sky and before the cattle arrived for milking, saved what was left over from the hard work of surviving ‘til she had a precious ten dollars to hire someone to move the light switch from the farthest wall in her bedroom, to the wall beside the door, so she wouldn’t be afraid when she entered late at night. Her husband, who slept in another room, refused to permit it and sent the electrician away.
Home is in the way we carry ourselves on "our" street, and the forgotten scent of summer and the remembered taste of fear, and the anticipation with which we greet the rhythmic knock on the door at the end of the work day: tum-ta-tum-tum. And sometimes, on pay day, after the bars close, the same rhythm may signal something darker, and this will be home too. And when we first arrive at the transom, in that first hour, the house will be chosen for its feeling of "fit"- good or poor, hand-me-down or custom made; when we have lived there awhile, it will be described just as “here”.
We want what we can not photograph - the smells of the kitchen on fish Fridays, and the sounds of the football game. We want patterns and ritual that tell us that time has passed with us in the same place. We have grown older with the rose bush we planted, more secure with the extra room we added over the garage, more responsible when our mother or father give up their home and move in with us. Without these links to patterns and rituals that speak of the passage of time, we are like those who have not given birth. There are no children to carry on the family name. We have no purchase on the future and when we are gone, it will be as though we never lived. We want our name on the mailbox, but more, we want the land to be linked to the way we lived-- the Farrell farm, Coy Hill-- as though we gave birth to these meadows, rocks and rivers, and perhaps we did, in building the stone walls out of the rocks that dented the plow; in felling and hewing the trees that support our roof. These were our labor pangs. We want maps with our identities like flags stuck in the highest peak. We shall be discoverers. We shall clear and plant the land, and when we are gone, the histories will name us as heroes, and others’ children will name our lands, ancestral.
What is there that is so compelling in this notion of a home of our own? There is in this, a seduction that is as great as any other we can offer. With a home on good land, we can raise our own food (or imagine it so), home-school our children, live free of social expectations and cultural dictates, and fear no eviction, no mobility that is not at our own hand. We are descendants of Puritans who believed that a home in a community would allow us to worship as we chose, contribute to a social fabric of our own making, and be free of the mandates of a distant, capricious government. We have inherited their dreams. And if there was little room for diversity of belief in the Puritan system, still, it is perhaps this notion that is as threatening to fundamentalists of any stripe as any other Western idea, from the equality of women, to the opportunity for social, economic, and geographical mobility that freedom brings. The home can provide us with the opportunity to make choices that may or may not reflect those of the government, the social order. The home can protect personal belief and individual acts. There are some who would argue that the home ties us into the capitalist economy, makes it harder for us to strike, be independent thinkers, but we can not resolve this here, for both are true. If we offer the American model of home ownership as propaganda to immigrants from developing nations, it may still be one of our greatest gifts; it is nourishment to those who must survive on dreams.
If asked then, how shall we describe this place we call “home”? The easiest answers are location--address or country, or the ambiguous “here,” which reveals nothing of memory, ritual or desire. These will be convenient lies, easier to tell than the truth of what we feel. It is like asking what our values are. We answer with “flag” and “god,” when what we really mean has no words to describe it. If home is structure, it is also the feel of the carpet behind the wing chair when they have forgotten to look for us. If home is family, it is also the “wait-‘til-your father-gets-home.” If it is the place we grew up, and where we live, and what we desire, it is also the spring mud on shoe soles and the well run dry. It is the “old neighborhood” and the “low-maintenance-condo.” Home is a sound we can hear when we are listening to something else- the baseball game in the other room when we are reading, or the slap of the screen door when we are still asleep. It is the multi-sensory place of our imagining, and the assurance that if the unforeseen can occur at work, home will be what we expect. Home is our link to the past and to the future, dowry and legacy, and home is the familiar stranger. Home is our hand-over-the-heart, love-it-or-leave-it, live-for-it-or-kill-for-it nation-state. But what we know in our bones is not what we own-up to, not the story we tell strangers; it may not even be what we tell ourselves. We reveal only fleeting images as we open the door to the visitor in the hall. The glimpses we share are chosen for acceptance-- the holiday-decorations, the awards and trophies, the cabinet with porcelain and crystal. Some will be invited in and will see more - the bills unpaid, the chipped dinner plates, and if these visitors proceed beyond the part-closed bedroom door, they will see the emblems of a marriage in flux in two unmade beds, the medications in the bathroom cabinet, and the woven or rent fabric of lives and lies.
But what of those who have less? There are some who will dream the home into being while they “squat” in a park, behind a dumpster, on a steam vent. There are those who live temporarily, they are reminded in a thousand ways, “temporarily” with cousins or friends. There are those who repudiate the homes in which they live but imagine that someday they will be rooted. There are those who live day-to-day waiting for a placement from which they can look for a placement, spending the night on chairs twinned to support head and legs, their belongings at their side. There are those for whom home hurts or is a weapon used against them. And there are those whose home town has died, who live in Chernobyl after the others have gone, or in a coal mining town after the mine has closed, in Love Canal or Three Mile Island. And there are “army brats” and migrants who live where they are told after their land has been taken for a highway between places they will never see, or for a dam that swallows everything in its path--houses, churches, graves. the animals that have burrowed deep in soft earth. There are those who appear settled, but in recreating a home that looks like the one they grew up in, they are reminded that they are not at home, not with a family disowned, a community destroyed, a nation absorbed in another name. And there are those that in repudiating a home, in defining the I-will-never-live-with-that-again’s, do nothing more than create the mirror image of what they thought they left behind.
And there are those who walk invisible among us, asking so little really, a “still-life”, a "from”, a “here,” a moment really, and another, strung together on a necklace like pearls, each luminescent with satisfaction; a ‘here:’ a moment in time from which to watch children growing into adults, love and desire turned to accommodation, curiosity become impatience. Is this not home, as well? That moment in time--in the past or in the future, or where we live while we are looking for something more? There are legions, who will never have more. They are refugees and exiles and the displaced. They are in every country in the world and in between, crossing borders and sometimes remaining in the same place while the powers-that-be change the name of the place they live without asking their approval. And there are children among them, too young to know of any “here” than beside their mother or father. And there are children among them, who have walked across countries in search of food. Shelter. Someone who speaks their language. Or simply because they can not stay “here.” And their lives will carry as much of what we need to know as the stories of the settlers. But few have told the tale of their longing. For refugees and settlers alike, “home” is an active (or an act of) creation - a furrow dug in shifting sands.
"I have come from what I have survived on."
Never having been settled long enough on a piece of land to see a tree grow from a dropped nut, to lie down before the bulldozers, I'd have to ironically echo the Cree who, asked his address by a Canadian court, replied, "I have come from what I have survived on." For me, it has been friends, poems, certain paintings and melodies, horizon lines.... Home is a bed to lie down on, a desk to write at, a few talismanic objects hovering nearby. (Tall, 47)
How then are we to understand the many meanings of home? And why should we bother? And who shall the experts be?
There is science that describes our homes in categories, and in so doing we are categorized, become statistics--explained, identified, captured, counted, taxed. Architects will tell us that home is physical-the colonial or ranch, the dining room and lanai. Economists will classify us as home owners or renters; urban or rural, sedentary or mobile. But such words reveal little about what we “have survived on.”
Demographers will use categories that explore home in terms of the activities and rituals of daily life: the miles to work and church memberships. We are classified by marketers by zip code and in terms of magazine subscriptions and sporting activities, and each time we buy a new product, the merchants add information to our portfolio. We become “achievers” or “believers”. But what do such categories know of the way we use our Sunday appointment with the lawn mower to retreat from the marriage? What do such categories know of the patterns of shared bathroom use and the divorces that began in the car parked too often in a neighbor’s driveway? What do they know about what we “have survived on?”
Designers tell us that “home” is in our possessions--the lawn furniture or the labels on the stereo. Anthropologists explain that home is social and cultural in the presence of a nuclear or extended family, in the presence of others in our neighborhoods who look like us, or worship like us - or don’t. Others will be driven to see our homes in political terms: the way we decorate our yards as an economic statement or as a reflection or rejection of community, or in terms of the disproportionate roles and responsibilities of women and men in the home, or in terms of the social mores which keep women and children in their subservient role. But still they know nothing about what I “have survived on.”
Something feels wrong; something is missing. It is not home these scientists and professionals are defining, but house. These are the words we use to describe the way other people live, not us. These are the words we use when we are placing an ad for a house we are trying to sell, when our desire for the structure or for each other has moved on: "4 BR, wbfpl, rivrvu." If it was desire we were advertising, or our "home," there would be no shorthand, no accommodation to word limits and cost in newsprint. I can imagine another kind of real estate ad: “morning light through east windows, curry and bay leaves in the kitchen drawers, and grandmother’s cut glass bowl on a high shelf.” These are autobiographical. These are narratives and bed-time stories, myth and fairy tale and lullaby, in the language of “the way it was then,” and “once upon a time,” and “happy ever after.”
We must look to literature then, as well as science. We must attend to the voices of the authors of dozens of books, who speak of our memory and aspirations, through memoir, and fiction which is often more accurate than the “true” stories we tell. We shall find our homes in the stream that runs beneath the surface, that also ran through the back yard; or in the light and dark of the high-rise roof-top, the subway car, the back of the Chevy pick-up. Home is remembered. Robert Coles wrote, "Without memory, we are everyone." We might add, without memory, we are everywhere … or nowhere. And home may be loss, and mourning and disaster and abandonment and violence and sorrow.
What is home then? A structure. A place to get in out of the rain or the heat. One young woman told me there was NO place like “home,” her tones conveying a rejection of the Norman Rockwell image with which we are so familiar. As a child of ten, a burglar had stabbed her as she slept in her bed. She “came to” as she was dragged to the backyard pool, and screaming, she survived. There is no place she trusts to be a “home.” It is mere bricks and mortar.
So what is home? A place of marriage or family. A place where we share our bed with another, or where the depression remains after the “significant other” is long gone.
So what is home? It is proprietary or leased. It is egocentric and social. It is mine, or ours, or theirs. It is the community that rejects us because we have the wrong skin color or worship the wrong god, have children or don’t. There are senior communities that disallow grandchildren, hospices that ask patients to leave if they have lived too long.
So what is home? A place that is not somewhere else. It is waiting for me after school or work. I am going to take off my shoes and watch television or fix the leak under the sink.
So what is home? A place in memory. When I was a child, I’d read under a tent of bed sheets with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep, and sometimes I’d hear them fight, or make love. And now my children sleep in the next room, and I wonder what they hear when they wake, fearing monsters beneath the bed or in the back of the closet.
So what is home? Food and language. Home is in the way our tongue curls around the word for morning bread, just as it curled around the bread itself. Home is in its taste, its smell, the rituals of baking and buttering--lefsa? pita?
And home is in the place our children’s bones are buried when they die before us. One friend told me of returning to his son's grave after a year, to find that the small stone with his name on it was missing. Now he would never know exactly where this child lies buried. "It was like losing a home," he said.
And home is the embeddedness of memories in walls “that won’t talk,” but yet tell everything of our past in each chip and scrape, and in that hole from that New Year’s eve when daddy came home drunk.
And home is the phrase spoken by our parents, some in nursing homes and some still at home: “Take me home,” they plead. “Take me home.” Where is it that they want to go? And how can we take them there? And do we protect ourselves, their children, by claiming it is the dementia speaking; protect ourselves from inheriting such fears?
So what is home? A place. A shelter. A family. A sanctuary. A prison. A language. A memory. Desire. A place like where I came from. And someday, I’ll have a door I can open and close just because I want to and not because I have to lock it to be safe.
So what is home? It is real or imagined. It is sacred mother earth. It is the place I’ll have one day, or never again. It is here and there, now and then, all or nothing. It is what I “have survived on.”
And home is the place that knows us best, and mourns our passing. Does not the house abandoned grieve for those who stroked its mantel and dusted its corners? Does the river run more mournfully over its rocks, if no one fishes along its banks or notices its ebb and flow? If there are those who will object to such anthropomorphic views of the house, they will find, in these pages, little comfort. If there are those who seek one answer to the meaning of home, they will be disappointed.
I wonder if we are ever home. Just home. Still. Not as in going home, or making home, or being at home, or leaving home. If we are home when the video camera becomes a still portrait, can we mount it on the wall and look at it when we are there? Will we see ourselves through the lens?
Memento mori :
I read this chapter again and again, struggle with its metaphors, linger on each one as though it will open some door to me, as though it will explain something I still do not quite understand. I was in New York for a presentation on September 11, 2001. It is now many months later, and I am in Vermont where the leaves are gilded and red. They float and descend slowly in spirals, as though reluctant to land; others are swift, driven like birds before the wind.
I watched the twin towers burn from the roof of the building in which I had grown up. I stood beside my mother as they crumbled, first one, then another. I searched for some place within me that would make some sense of what I was seeing, and found none. The presentation canceled, I could have fled back to Vermont (I wrote home and then erased it), returned to a landscape innocent of smoke and death, but something would not let me leave. It was not that I felt I was at home in New York and needed to stay. While all the rituals were familiar, the streets I knew seemed alien. I walked where I had played as a child, passed the school I had attended from kindergarten to Senior year. I passed beneath the windows through which I had watched and been watched for more years than I had lived anywhere else, and I returned to the firehouse two blocks away. I walked with friends to vigils, sang songs that were familiar but I could remember nothing past the second stanza without prompting. There were no cars on the street; the stores were shuttered. I walked with an empty head, as though all I knew had been sucked away in flame and smoke. I could not cry. I did not sleep. And when the cars returned, I knew I had to leave, return to Vermont, where I organized a candle light vigil with friends - luminaria of wax, sand and paper, like pagans before the gods. We ate together, hugged, and in the end I felt still further away, from the life I had known. It was not a sense of home that had kept me wandering the New York streets; nor home that drew me back to Vermont. I knew only one thing in my empty brain, that I needed to be “here”. Can we only have one true home, I wonder? Is the love of place, like falling in love with someone other than the one to whom we have pledged ourselves? Is it adultery to love more than one home; a greater sin to belong to neither? I am an atheist in search of my creator.
Here goes...
CHAPTER 1: THE MEANINGS OF “HOME”:
“..where I’m from.”
After years of pursuing myself through the world, I am ready to pause, to arrive once more..at a here, and stay long enough so that "here" is all that need be said. I want to recognize my neighbors, not wake up in the morning and squint trying to remember where I am, not hesitate wondering how to answer when asked where I'm from. I have no original "from" of any lastingness, nor have I made myself one... I want to stop the rolling camera. I want a close-up, a still life, and me in the picture. (Tall 1993, 16).
“Where are you from?” Such a simple question. When we meet a stranger, names exchanged, we gauge shoes, hair style, logos and piercings, assess the rhythms of speech and idioms: are you from here? Do I know that accent? What are the places that have shaped you?
Why does it matter, this “from”?
Once we didn’t need to ask. We never traveled far from the hearth. Those we met at market or on the street knew us, our siblings, parents, grandparents. They waved and went about their business, knowing that like the sun’s rising, and the cold that follows a clear winter sky, we would pass the day at our appointed tasks. The hay would be cut, the papers filed, the children walked to school. We knew who to call when someone was sick or the barn was burning; we knew who had whiskey hidden in the basement or barn, and who was sleeping in someone else’s arms.
When I arrived in this tiny town of 800 in a valley between mountains, there were still many whose grandparents had grown up here. The fire company’s volunteers were descendants of the families buried in the “old” cemetery where there’s no longer any room. The grange put on a popular “country show” and sponsored the Memorial Day parade which drew people from miles away to sit on lawns and watch the passing children’s floats and the military vehicles and ambulance squad trucks from communities an hour’s drive away.
Ten years later, the children who stay are the anomaly, and there is only one dairy farm left, where seven farmers used to send their cows to graze the high pastures. People still greet each other at Town Meeting every March when the old-timers and “newcomers” who came here in the back-to-the-land era of 40 years ago debate the highway and school budgets. But there are fewer gatherings at the firehouse when the third and fourth generation natives sit beside the new parents who came “from away,” and the Memorial Day parade is a shadow of what it once was.
“Old timers like me don’t see any point in votin’ anymore,” my friend said. “They keep on raisin’ taxes for the school and that road. Used to be hard work meant you used a shovel; now they just sit up there in that bucket loader and call it a day.”
I live in an anachronism, where the old timers see the second graders making power point presentations in school on computers paid for with the taxes on hard work plowing and boiling sap for maple syrup or working on an industrial assembly line. And those plants too are closing. The orchard that used to supply an income for dozens of town residents has been abandoned by “flatlander” owners whose interest has moved on; the trees are girdled by rodents and their house is for sale, along with 50 percent of the housing stock which is owned by those who come here only on weekends or to ski or for the changing of the leaves. At the same time, the tiny library is booming, with story hour and old movies, knitting circle and a women’s financial group. The participants are mostly transplants who have come here for the “here” here.
This town may be the exception or it may prove the rule. If I know my neighbors, exchange gifts at Christmas and we greet each other over the tomatoes in the garden or at the post office where maintaining a postal box is an excuse for social gathering, there is less visiting at the kitchen table. If the pot luck is a high art, one of the seniors just moved to her daughter’s home, for reasons unspoken. Perhaps it was because there were no customers for the braided rugs that must have once paid the taxes, or because there was no one to look in on her with her sons and daughter-in-law working out of the area, or perhaps she was just lonely without the circle of senior women who met twice a week to lift free weights and gossip. Once she was a farm wife isolated by an abusive husband, gathering water at the trough in the morning before the cows came down from the high pasture to be milked. She had the rituals then, of getting the kids off to school and keeping the house warm in winter. Now she was alone again, and there were no rituals of baking pies on a wood stove twice a day, and washing diapers for four babies, in the buckets of water carried by hand.
All around this tiny town, there are larger places where we do not know the strangers we pass, or even those with whom we share the places we live and work. We have no roles on which our neighbors depend. We have not become firemen because our father and his father were firemen; we do not know the sound of danger in dry grass. We are not the teachers who taught multiplication tables to the Smith or Jones boy; we will not tutor the “slow” ones after school. Few of us are dairymen who can tell from the way a cow holds its head, whether the calf will be stillborn. Few are farmers or gatherers who know when to harvest the crops for root cellaring through a lean winter; there are no seasons at the supermarket. Salad is sewn and reaped without the benefit of soil, under glass and lights, and kiwi fruit harvested in New Zealand spreads sterile seeds on our melamine, fiberglass, glassteel, polycarbonate lunch tray in New York. We are as rootless as the food that is raised without soil under lights that defy the passages of day and night.
We will need to renegotiate who we are. When I graduated from high school, my kindergarten teachers were at the “school assembly.” But now there are few communities where anyone will remember either our exploits in school or the family skeletons. Truth be told that is freeing, not to be compared to your older brother or sister; the world is full of possibilities, or so we believe when we are young. We can be stockbrokers or architects, policy advocates, biochemists or CFOs. But what we gain in mobility we lose in connection. Our work will be inexplicable to those outside our profession, and disconnected from the places in which we live. Our identities will be drawn from something other than the land and the communities in which we were born. When once our children knew the tools of our trade and carried them to “show and tell,” what will we have to show for our work now, other than an i-pad?
“Where did you grow up?” we ask on the first day of school. Many of us know no such thing. We are migrants, refugees of many chalk dusted school rooms and boy scout campfires. We will be husbands and wives, until half of us divorce. We will be workers, until we are laid off or move on to leadership roles, where we are judged by our understanding of globalization rather than our wisdom about local markets and vernacular patterns. We will specialize in the place-less. We will become wizards of the ur-place, the universal, the utopia which is literally the no-place. Our cities and towns will look more and more the same. Whether Detroit or Dubuque, our places will reflect the common denominator determined by traffic and trade rather than tradition.
In the countryside, new species will take up residence in our soil and water, carried in our produce boxes and on our sneakered feet, on our tires and boat engines until the vernacular landscape is swallowed alive. In July 2010, NOAA awarded the University of Notre Dame, $2.5 million to study and develop countermeasures to invasive species in the Great Lakes. The announcement read, “The Asian carp invasion will play a role in the study... The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, which feed into Lake Michigan, are already teeming with the fish, which were likely released when flooding damaged aquaculture ponds where the fish had been used to eat pond wastes (NOAA Awards $2.5 Million for Research on Invasive Species in the Great Lakes, 2010).” “Feed into Lake Michigan.”
We are eating the seeds of the destruction of our landscapes. We are flooding our villages and towns with an omni-culture that will eat everything of the “here,” of the “home,” leaving only nostalgia for ‘what-once-was’ in its wake.
But that nostalgia is a powerful drug.
At the same time that we aspire to the omni--whether of opportunity or place, of language or popular culture, we conserve landscapes and build historic preservation societies which look backward at a moment in time, cast it in amber, await some genetic process that can clone our history, revivify it, turn it into the Disneyland small town with its walkable streets, safe for what we imagine to be community. Such “new urbanism” rejects the automobile, champions local schools, and work at walkable distances from residences. A main street of small businesses with second story residential and fraternal organizations will be our village heart and we will greet each other over lattes and “take-out Chinese”. One “new town” (now decades old) was designed and built by Disney’s imagineers. In “Celebration,” the marketing pitch is: “There once was a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight. Where children chased fireflies...The movie house showed cartoons on Saturday. The grocery store delivered...Remember that place?..It held a magic all its own. The special magic of an American hometown.” (Ross 1999)
There is a template that undergirds the new urbanism of these small towns, and like the cookie cutter dolls of my childhood, we are snapping on the elements of street and school footprint and choosing the porch or Victorian embellishment that mimics something we know only from the movies. We did not grow up with these small towns; we did not grow up knowing how to “visit.” And without a program that will teach us how to come outside on a summer evening, how to suspend our telecommuting / multi-tasking/ Tivo lives, we may not know how to build community anymore, or how to “neighbor.” Arlie Hochschild (19xx) says we’d rather stay at work these days, than come home to the chores that await us, or our neighbors. Or those we married.
The landscape savant, J.B. Jackson wrote a tale of 300 years of the iconic Tinkham family from Puritan settlers in New England who husbanded a parcel of land within sight of the church in 1653 to their 1950s progeny, living in a suburban enclave 12 miles from town, where the landscape itself is altered to meet the needs of irrigation of crops that will never be eaten on the land on which they are grown (Jackson 1953). Philip Ackerman-Leist who has studied homesteading from the inside, says that farmers won’t eat the food produced on their own lands --partly out of awareness of the toxins that keep the pests at bay and partly because we have all become accustomed to the shrink-wrapped out-of-season product on the supermarket shelves (citation).
Vernacular architecture once was built of what grew on our land; we ate what we eked out of poor soils; our communities depended on us for what we were good at, whether carpentry or animal care, and our needs could be filled by what and who we saw in the course of a day’s passing. In the 1950s, our children had no plans to stay where they grew up, nor for that matter, did their parents. Sixty years later, we are building a schizophrenic nation split between a hometown that aspires to be the movie set for Pleasantville, what James Kunstler has called ‘the geography of nowhere,” and the cities whose phallic architecture competes like so many Towers of Babel for futurist status. Will we remember these aeries in Abu Dhabi and Singapore as home? Or will they be exemplars of the omniverse?
And tower of Babel or Celebration, if our places have melded into a single omniverse, our identities are melding too. If our place in society is ambiguous, if we are fungible commodities and our communities have lost the vernacular wisdom of that deep integration in the rhythms of the land, what will be left of “home”? What is it that the new young parents see in this wrinkle in the mountain fabric? What is it that calls to them? And is the tofu, avocado chocolate pie the same as the “ambrosia” of fruit laden jello or boxed macaroni and cheese of the 1950s or the baked beans and apple pies baked by old women whose cool circulation-circumscribed hands make perfect crusts?
“Where are you from?” we ask. The answer comes only after gauging the questioner, and the place we linger to chat. “I am an American,” we say when we are walking Barcelona’s Ramblas; “a New Yorker” at Seattle’s Pike Street Market. “I live on the Upper West Side” an investment broker said to assure me of his interest in socially responsible investments; “my wife is a social worker.” There was some sense that I would know his values, trust his decisions, recognize him as a familiar, in knowing the place he lived, what his wife did for a living. When did we forget that such assurances meant little in the language of the 21st century? No such assurances are needed when we are grounded in place--“I’m from here,” we say. But we have not been grounded in place for a decade now, or longer, since the Wars taught “our boys” about the other side of the pond; since television and the movies and the internet taught us that there really were no boundaries anymore.
Is it this that Tall longs for - a “hot and a cot,” four-square and a roof? She says only that it is a “here” she seeks, distinct, lasting, in her own image. But is it only a “here” that we see in our waking dreams, a curve of earth that shelters us from rain and cold, or is it more that Tall wants--a sense of history on the land and morning ritual, a place that recognizes our step, our head and hip on the bed at night? And just so, is the “from” she seeks, some knowledge of the patterns of house and land, some sense of which corners hold afternoon light and welcome dawn?
What is “here”? What is “home”? Such an obvious question. Not worth a struggle. Look it up in the dictionary and find that it is a house, an apartment, a residence, an abode, a dwelling , habitation, a native place. Home, then, is a physical place, or one we occupy for a time. We can see it if we close our eyes--high-rise apartment building or free-standing structure in a yard, brick or clapboard or aluminum sided, old or new .
It is the place we reside: the street name on the second line of our tax forms; our hometown on the return address of envelopes with mortgage payments, job applications and love letters. But is this what we long for, pray for, pay for? We answer with where we live now or where we were born, where we spent most of our life, or the last place we stayed more than a year. Home is a physical place of course,, but there is, in this most simple of answers, a dissembling. It is the most cursory of replies, focusing on the “where”, the geography of place, the structure, rather than the notion of “home” itself; it says little about what we think of. It says nothing of what we feel.
If home is an address, a geographic and physical place; if it is the backdrop for the photographs in the family album, it is also family--extended or nuclear; birth or blended. It is our husband’s place at the wheel of the car, the place our parents live. It is the place of memory: before the house burned or flooded or crumbled or was sold. It is the place of desire, the “some-day” place: when we’ve saved enough or paid our dues or gotten a job or gotten married or live alone at last. It is harbor and safety; it is prospect and vista. It is a native place, cradle to grave. It is the place to which we feel entitled; it is where our “stuff” is. It is “self.” “Home is where the heart is,” we say when we want to suggest the emotions that ground us. The "hearth" contains the "heart"; the bed, the body; the attic, our dreams. There is some sense in which the home, like the beloved pet, is our companion. We return exhausted at the end of the work day, expecting it to recognize our step, to welcome our head and hip in the bed at night. We dress it for the holidays, leave radios on in our absence, like some conversation to which we will return. We see it as our better nature--our surrogate, standing in for us when we are away. And when we return from travel, we return to our self: “there is no place like home.”
Truth be told, we want much more than a “from” or a “here”. These are words spoken to those who come from further away. “Where are you from?” they will ask as they introduce themselves or stop us for directions. “Here,” we shall say, and that will be enough. But it is not enough, except for the most mobile, the nomad. For these, seeking only a curve of earth as shelter from rain and cold, “here” is as much as can be imagined. With no experience of being “placed,” such nomads will be pushed, as refugees, before those whose imaginations run deeper, grander. They will be pushed before the onslaught of “settlers,” for whom the home is completion, a coming full circle to the place we believe we “belong.” Even the homeless have grander ambitions, according to those who work to place them in inner-city neighborhoods, near social services. They want no shelter, no SRO, nor co-operative housing, but dream, like the settled, of the picket fenced yard and all it represents. With the yard will come the child playing ball outside, and the barbecue. With the yard will come the job from which we can return “home” and the garage, and with the garage will come the car, and with the car, some time to travel: MacDonald’s for Sunday dinner, a place in the country with fresh eggs and tomatoes like when our grandparents were children, or like “Jack and Jill who climbed the hill.” And when we travel, the real purpose will be to come home. Return will be the most important goal of leaving.
What is it that we dream of then? What is it that we see in the photo album of home?
What is your home?
It is not mere architecture, nor the garden displays we point-and-shoot. We want something intimate, something that suggests our individual bonds and patterns. Home will be measured in the crack in the ceiling over the bed, traced with a fingertip each night as we dreamed before we slept. Home will be described in our place in the empty dining room chair after death or divorce. It will be measured in homework done at kitchen counter or on the bed or in the study, and in the ringing of the phone at dinnertime. There is no other word to describe the feeling of disappointment and relief when it is just a familiar voice calling to say hello--no “Publisher’s Clearinghouse,” no collection agent. Home is measured in knowing where the light switch is with our eyes closed.
One friend, that wife of a farmer, who moved in with her daughter, who had no well, who drew the water for the day’s washing and cooking from the cows’ trough before the light was in the sky and before the cattle arrived for milking, saved what was left over from the hard work of surviving ‘til she had a precious ten dollars to hire someone to move the light switch from the farthest wall in her bedroom, to the wall beside the door, so she wouldn’t be afraid when she entered late at night. Her husband, who slept in another room, refused to permit it and sent the electrician away.
Home is in the way we carry ourselves on "our" street, and the forgotten scent of summer and the remembered taste of fear, and the anticipation with which we greet the rhythmic knock on the door at the end of the work day: tum-ta-tum-tum. And sometimes, on pay day, after the bars close, the same rhythm may signal something darker, and this will be home too. And when we first arrive at the transom, in that first hour, the house will be chosen for its feeling of "fit"- good or poor, hand-me-down or custom made; when we have lived there awhile, it will be described just as “here”.
We want what we can not photograph - the smells of the kitchen on fish Fridays, and the sounds of the football game. We want patterns and ritual that tell us that time has passed with us in the same place. We have grown older with the rose bush we planted, more secure with the extra room we added over the garage, more responsible when our mother or father give up their home and move in with us. Without these links to patterns and rituals that speak of the passage of time, we are like those who have not given birth. There are no children to carry on the family name. We have no purchase on the future and when we are gone, it will be as though we never lived. We want our name on the mailbox, but more, we want the land to be linked to the way we lived-- the Farrell farm, Coy Hill-- as though we gave birth to these meadows, rocks and rivers, and perhaps we did, in building the stone walls out of the rocks that dented the plow; in felling and hewing the trees that support our roof. These were our labor pangs. We want maps with our identities like flags stuck in the highest peak. We shall be discoverers. We shall clear and plant the land, and when we are gone, the histories will name us as heroes, and others’ children will name our lands, ancestral.
What is there that is so compelling in this notion of a home of our own? There is in this, a seduction that is as great as any other we can offer. With a home on good land, we can raise our own food (or imagine it so), home-school our children, live free of social expectations and cultural dictates, and fear no eviction, no mobility that is not at our own hand. We are descendants of Puritans who believed that a home in a community would allow us to worship as we chose, contribute to a social fabric of our own making, and be free of the mandates of a distant, capricious government. We have inherited their dreams. And if there was little room for diversity of belief in the Puritan system, still, it is perhaps this notion that is as threatening to fundamentalists of any stripe as any other Western idea, from the equality of women, to the opportunity for social, economic, and geographical mobility that freedom brings. The home can provide us with the opportunity to make choices that may or may not reflect those of the government, the social order. The home can protect personal belief and individual acts. There are some who would argue that the home ties us into the capitalist economy, makes it harder for us to strike, be independent thinkers, but we can not resolve this here, for both are true. If we offer the American model of home ownership as propaganda to immigrants from developing nations, it may still be one of our greatest gifts; it is nourishment to those who must survive on dreams.
If asked then, how shall we describe this place we call “home”? The easiest answers are location--address or country, or the ambiguous “here,” which reveals nothing of memory, ritual or desire. These will be convenient lies, easier to tell than the truth of what we feel. It is like asking what our values are. We answer with “flag” and “god,” when what we really mean has no words to describe it. If home is structure, it is also the feel of the carpet behind the wing chair when they have forgotten to look for us. If home is family, it is also the “wait-‘til-your father-gets-home.” If it is the place we grew up, and where we live, and what we desire, it is also the spring mud on shoe soles and the well run dry. It is the “old neighborhood” and the “low-maintenance-condo.” Home is a sound we can hear when we are listening to something else- the baseball game in the other room when we are reading, or the slap of the screen door when we are still asleep. It is the multi-sensory place of our imagining, and the assurance that if the unforeseen can occur at work, home will be what we expect. Home is our link to the past and to the future, dowry and legacy, and home is the familiar stranger. Home is our hand-over-the-heart, love-it-or-leave-it, live-for-it-or-kill-for-it nation-state. But what we know in our bones is not what we own-up to, not the story we tell strangers; it may not even be what we tell ourselves. We reveal only fleeting images as we open the door to the visitor in the hall. The glimpses we share are chosen for acceptance-- the holiday-decorations, the awards and trophies, the cabinet with porcelain and crystal. Some will be invited in and will see more - the bills unpaid, the chipped dinner plates, and if these visitors proceed beyond the part-closed bedroom door, they will see the emblems of a marriage in flux in two unmade beds, the medications in the bathroom cabinet, and the woven or rent fabric of lives and lies.
But what of those who have less? There are some who will dream the home into being while they “squat” in a park, behind a dumpster, on a steam vent. There are those who live temporarily, they are reminded in a thousand ways, “temporarily” with cousins or friends. There are those who repudiate the homes in which they live but imagine that someday they will be rooted. There are those who live day-to-day waiting for a placement from which they can look for a placement, spending the night on chairs twinned to support head and legs, their belongings at their side. There are those for whom home hurts or is a weapon used against them. And there are those whose home town has died, who live in Chernobyl after the others have gone, or in a coal mining town after the mine has closed, in Love Canal or Three Mile Island. And there are “army brats” and migrants who live where they are told after their land has been taken for a highway between places they will never see, or for a dam that swallows everything in its path--houses, churches, graves. the animals that have burrowed deep in soft earth. There are those who appear settled, but in recreating a home that looks like the one they grew up in, they are reminded that they are not at home, not with a family disowned, a community destroyed, a nation absorbed in another name. And there are those that in repudiating a home, in defining the I-will-never-live-with-that-again’s, do nothing more than create the mirror image of what they thought they left behind.
And there are those who walk invisible among us, asking so little really, a “still-life”, a "from”, a “here,” a moment really, and another, strung together on a necklace like pearls, each luminescent with satisfaction; a ‘here:’ a moment in time from which to watch children growing into adults, love and desire turned to accommodation, curiosity become impatience. Is this not home, as well? That moment in time--in the past or in the future, or where we live while we are looking for something more? There are legions, who will never have more. They are refugees and exiles and the displaced. They are in every country in the world and in between, crossing borders and sometimes remaining in the same place while the powers-that-be change the name of the place they live without asking their approval. And there are children among them, too young to know of any “here” than beside their mother or father. And there are children among them, who have walked across countries in search of food. Shelter. Someone who speaks their language. Or simply because they can not stay “here.” And their lives will carry as much of what we need to know as the stories of the settlers. But few have told the tale of their longing. For refugees and settlers alike, “home” is an active (or an act of) creation - a furrow dug in shifting sands.
"I have come from what I have survived on."
Never having been settled long enough on a piece of land to see a tree grow from a dropped nut, to lie down before the bulldozers, I'd have to ironically echo the Cree who, asked his address by a Canadian court, replied, "I have come from what I have survived on." For me, it has been friends, poems, certain paintings and melodies, horizon lines.... Home is a bed to lie down on, a desk to write at, a few talismanic objects hovering nearby. (Tall, 47)
How then are we to understand the many meanings of home? And why should we bother? And who shall the experts be?
There is science that describes our homes in categories, and in so doing we are categorized, become statistics--explained, identified, captured, counted, taxed. Architects will tell us that home is physical-the colonial or ranch, the dining room and lanai. Economists will classify us as home owners or renters; urban or rural, sedentary or mobile. But such words reveal little about what we “have survived on.”
Demographers will use categories that explore home in terms of the activities and rituals of daily life: the miles to work and church memberships. We are classified by marketers by zip code and in terms of magazine subscriptions and sporting activities, and each time we buy a new product, the merchants add information to our portfolio. We become “achievers” or “believers”. But what do such categories know of the way we use our Sunday appointment with the lawn mower to retreat from the marriage? What do such categories know of the patterns of shared bathroom use and the divorces that began in the car parked too often in a neighbor’s driveway? What do they know about what we “have survived on?”
Designers tell us that “home” is in our possessions--the lawn furniture or the labels on the stereo. Anthropologists explain that home is social and cultural in the presence of a nuclear or extended family, in the presence of others in our neighborhoods who look like us, or worship like us - or don’t. Others will be driven to see our homes in political terms: the way we decorate our yards as an economic statement or as a reflection or rejection of community, or in terms of the disproportionate roles and responsibilities of women and men in the home, or in terms of the social mores which keep women and children in their subservient role. But still they know nothing about what I “have survived on.”
Something feels wrong; something is missing. It is not home these scientists and professionals are defining, but house. These are the words we use to describe the way other people live, not us. These are the words we use when we are placing an ad for a house we are trying to sell, when our desire for the structure or for each other has moved on: "4 BR, wbfpl, rivrvu." If it was desire we were advertising, or our "home," there would be no shorthand, no accommodation to word limits and cost in newsprint. I can imagine another kind of real estate ad: “morning light through east windows, curry and bay leaves in the kitchen drawers, and grandmother’s cut glass bowl on a high shelf.” These are autobiographical. These are narratives and bed-time stories, myth and fairy tale and lullaby, in the language of “the way it was then,” and “once upon a time,” and “happy ever after.”
We must look to literature then, as well as science. We must attend to the voices of the authors of dozens of books, who speak of our memory and aspirations, through memoir, and fiction which is often more accurate than the “true” stories we tell. We shall find our homes in the stream that runs beneath the surface, that also ran through the back yard; or in the light and dark of the high-rise roof-top, the subway car, the back of the Chevy pick-up. Home is remembered. Robert Coles wrote, "Without memory, we are everyone." We might add, without memory, we are everywhere … or nowhere. And home may be loss, and mourning and disaster and abandonment and violence and sorrow.
What is home then? A structure. A place to get in out of the rain or the heat. One young woman told me there was NO place like “home,” her tones conveying a rejection of the Norman Rockwell image with which we are so familiar. As a child of ten, a burglar had stabbed her as she slept in her bed. She “came to” as she was dragged to the backyard pool, and screaming, she survived. There is no place she trusts to be a “home.” It is mere bricks and mortar.
So what is home? A place of marriage or family. A place where we share our bed with another, or where the depression remains after the “significant other” is long gone.
So what is home? It is proprietary or leased. It is egocentric and social. It is mine, or ours, or theirs. It is the community that rejects us because we have the wrong skin color or worship the wrong god, have children or don’t. There are senior communities that disallow grandchildren, hospices that ask patients to leave if they have lived too long.
So what is home? A place that is not somewhere else. It is waiting for me after school or work. I am going to take off my shoes and watch television or fix the leak under the sink.
So what is home? A place in memory. When I was a child, I’d read under a tent of bed sheets with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep, and sometimes I’d hear them fight, or make love. And now my children sleep in the next room, and I wonder what they hear when they wake, fearing monsters beneath the bed or in the back of the closet.
So what is home? Food and language. Home is in the way our tongue curls around the word for morning bread, just as it curled around the bread itself. Home is in its taste, its smell, the rituals of baking and buttering--lefsa? pita?
And home is in the place our children’s bones are buried when they die before us. One friend told me of returning to his son's grave after a year, to find that the small stone with his name on it was missing. Now he would never know exactly where this child lies buried. "It was like losing a home," he said.
And home is the embeddedness of memories in walls “that won’t talk,” but yet tell everything of our past in each chip and scrape, and in that hole from that New Year’s eve when daddy came home drunk.
And home is the phrase spoken by our parents, some in nursing homes and some still at home: “Take me home,” they plead. “Take me home.” Where is it that they want to go? And how can we take them there? And do we protect ourselves, their children, by claiming it is the dementia speaking; protect ourselves from inheriting such fears?
So what is home? A place. A shelter. A family. A sanctuary. A prison. A language. A memory. Desire. A place like where I came from. And someday, I’ll have a door I can open and close just because I want to and not because I have to lock it to be safe.
So what is home? It is real or imagined. It is sacred mother earth. It is the place I’ll have one day, or never again. It is here and there, now and then, all or nothing. It is what I “have survived on.”
And home is the place that knows us best, and mourns our passing. Does not the house abandoned grieve for those who stroked its mantel and dusted its corners? Does the river run more mournfully over its rocks, if no one fishes along its banks or notices its ebb and flow? If there are those who will object to such anthropomorphic views of the house, they will find, in these pages, little comfort. If there are those who seek one answer to the meaning of home, they will be disappointed.
I wonder if we are ever home. Just home. Still. Not as in going home, or making home, or being at home, or leaving home. If we are home when the video camera becomes a still portrait, can we mount it on the wall and look at it when we are there? Will we see ourselves through the lens?
Memento mori :
I read this chapter again and again, struggle with its metaphors, linger on each one as though it will open some door to me, as though it will explain something I still do not quite understand. I was in New York for a presentation on September 11, 2001. It is now many months later, and I am in Vermont where the leaves are gilded and red. They float and descend slowly in spirals, as though reluctant to land; others are swift, driven like birds before the wind.
I watched the twin towers burn from the roof of the building in which I had grown up. I stood beside my mother as they crumbled, first one, then another. I searched for some place within me that would make some sense of what I was seeing, and found none. The presentation canceled, I could have fled back to Vermont (I wrote home and then erased it), returned to a landscape innocent of smoke and death, but something would not let me leave. It was not that I felt I was at home in New York and needed to stay. While all the rituals were familiar, the streets I knew seemed alien. I walked where I had played as a child, passed the school I had attended from kindergarten to Senior year. I passed beneath the windows through which I had watched and been watched for more years than I had lived anywhere else, and I returned to the firehouse two blocks away. I walked with friends to vigils, sang songs that were familiar but I could remember nothing past the second stanza without prompting. There were no cars on the street; the stores were shuttered. I walked with an empty head, as though all I knew had been sucked away in flame and smoke. I could not cry. I did not sleep. And when the cars returned, I knew I had to leave, return to Vermont, where I organized a candle light vigil with friends - luminaria of wax, sand and paper, like pagans before the gods. We ate together, hugged, and in the end I felt still further away, from the life I had known. It was not a sense of home that had kept me wandering the New York streets; nor home that drew me back to Vermont. I knew only one thing in my empty brain, that I needed to be “here”. Can we only have one true home, I wonder? Is the love of place, like falling in love with someone other than the one to whom we have pledged ourselves? Is it adultery to love more than one home; a greater sin to belong to neither? I am an atheist in search of my creator.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
I am sitting at my desk in my tiny house in my tiny town in my tiny state. This is a state of 621,760 and one well-founded estimate says that in 2009 there were 300,000 wage earners paying taxes in this state. [CORRECTION!!! My friend Bill says: 310,000 income tax filers of whom 160,000 must pay something. The rest are income-sensitized out of any income tax liability."] That is, all the schools and all the roads are paid for by 160,000 people. In normal times, these two issues are hugely contentious at town meetings which determine the expenditures by local government. This town of 800 or so people has a $2 million school budget for 57 elementary school kids and 22 children who are bused to area middle and high schools. We are lucky that the town came out relatively unscathed though Rodney and Alida lost their sweet corn and there are sections of road out on North St. and West St.
My friend Emmett came by this morning with 5 lovely garden tomatoes. I gave him a yellow squash and some patty pan squash and some sun gold tomatoes. Linda and Ursula are drowning in a half bushel of tomatoes for sauce, from another neighbor's garden. I describe gardeners as a generous breed. Sometimes we are too generous.
But I am struck by this generosity at a time when there are people who can't get out of their homes because of the road closures and bridges that have washed out.There is an estimate of 250 road closures state-wide due to Hurricane Irene.One friend can't get to her job in a town a half hour from here, across the washed out east-west Rt. 4. Her father leaves his truck at the paved road and gets on the 4 wheeler at the top of a logging road to get home--before dark. The small bridge to his trailer was washed out. Multiply that by tens of thousands.
I am actually longing for some protein and since I don't eat meat and eat fairly little poultry, that means fish. And there isn't any in the freezer.I can drive to the town with the supermarkets - that section of road is open. Not everyone can. Multiply that by some thousands.
******************
So I am thinking ...I am teaching a class in NYC in a newly minted program in Sustainable Interior Environments, and the first class was drowned out by Hurricane Irene. I am teaching students I have never met, by email and the internet. Certainly driving to NYC is not a sustainable solution but the train system is a disaster, and it won't be easy to get to Boston to take the bus to NYC which had been my plan.
And that's not much more sustainable than driving to NYC in the first place.
I suppose I am hyper-aware of what sustainability means when the road system has failed. Vermont has few roads to begin with - two major north south roads and a handful of major east west roads, and three southern/central ones had been severed as of last night.
So I have asked my student-colleagues to define sustainability. And they will no doubt talk about "green materials" and low energy use.
And I am thinking that sustainability has something to do with living in communities that don't require a trip to the supermarket for protein (which if I ate meat I could do here). Which reminds me that two of our friends have start-up farms and one raises chickens. I wonder how they are faring.
And living in a place where if I have squash and you have tomatoes, we both eat decent food. A NYC friend took an apple from my tree that I had transported from VT and ate it without washing it. "No sprays," she said.
I understand that two warring parties in town came together to get North Street paved (though there may be some remuneration involved).
Now if only .... My husband sometimes says that my posts aren't finished. I think he's right again.
My friend Emmett came by this morning with 5 lovely garden tomatoes. I gave him a yellow squash and some patty pan squash and some sun gold tomatoes. Linda and Ursula are drowning in a half bushel of tomatoes for sauce, from another neighbor's garden. I describe gardeners as a generous breed. Sometimes we are too generous.
But I am struck by this generosity at a time when there are people who can't get out of their homes because of the road closures and bridges that have washed out.There is an estimate of 250 road closures state-wide due to Hurricane Irene.One friend can't get to her job in a town a half hour from here, across the washed out east-west Rt. 4. Her father leaves his truck at the paved road and gets on the 4 wheeler at the top of a logging road to get home--before dark. The small bridge to his trailer was washed out. Multiply that by tens of thousands.
I am actually longing for some protein and since I don't eat meat and eat fairly little poultry, that means fish. And there isn't any in the freezer.I can drive to the town with the supermarkets - that section of road is open. Not everyone can. Multiply that by some thousands.
******************
So I am thinking ...I am teaching a class in NYC in a newly minted program in Sustainable Interior Environments, and the first class was drowned out by Hurricane Irene. I am teaching students I have never met, by email and the internet. Certainly driving to NYC is not a sustainable solution but the train system is a disaster, and it won't be easy to get to Boston to take the bus to NYC which had been my plan.
And that's not much more sustainable than driving to NYC in the first place.
I suppose I am hyper-aware of what sustainability means when the road system has failed. Vermont has few roads to begin with - two major north south roads and a handful of major east west roads, and three southern/central ones had been severed as of last night.
So I have asked my student-colleagues to define sustainability. And they will no doubt talk about "green materials" and low energy use.
And I am thinking that sustainability has something to do with living in communities that don't require a trip to the supermarket for protein (which if I ate meat I could do here). Which reminds me that two of our friends have start-up farms and one raises chickens. I wonder how they are faring.
And living in a place where if I have squash and you have tomatoes, we both eat decent food. A NYC friend took an apple from my tree that I had transported from VT and ate it without washing it. "No sprays," she said.
I understand that two warring parties in town came together to get North Street paved (though there may be some remuneration involved).
Now if only .... My husband sometimes says that my posts aren't finished. I think he's right again.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Back in Vermont
So I am back in my tiny little house in this tiny town... You may be wondering who I am and why I am sending you these notes. I could tell you in more specific ways who I am... and I will do that eventually. But for now, what matters is the wind and the water.
I was expecting to meet you on Monday. I was expecting that we would get to know each other as colleagues and friends. Instead of standing in a classroom somewhere on the west side of Manhattan, I was weaving through roads beside muddy cornfields, some submerged in five to 6 feet of water, roiling from the Battenkill River.
I followed the route the GPS picked for me, up through Paramus' shopping corridor and the land of cheap(er) gas where they still clean the windshield for you. I was routed to the Palisades where I hadn't been since I was a girl, driving with my father whose love for the car was exceeded only by his need for ritual. He stacked the change from his pockets in size order every night. He scooped the excess butter from the holes in his bread and used it on other areas. He has been gone some 15 years now. And my mother is not well.
That's why I was in New York--along with meeting you. I was there to help her with some medical procedures. And I was sitting on the couch in the apartment I grew up in while I wrote to you. I have always been a New Yorker, even when I have tried to leave it behind. And I know the view outside the single pane windows over the park as well as I know anything in my life. I listened to the storm from Irene come in at 5 in the morning. I heard it on the metal housing of the air conditioner. I watched the clouds on Sunday as the wind picked up, and yes, I walked to the Hudson. I needed the air. I lay down on a bench in Hudson Park and watched the clouds roll over me. I walked back through the west village and had lemon granita in a place I have gone to since I was a teenager. I walked back to the apartment and packed.
I left at midday and wound through roads choked with traffic, and a highway that was startlingly empty. I wound my way around barriers at tiny bridges over brooks that had become rivers. I watched the driver of an 18-wheeler back up, his rig of wood shavings for animals slanted uphill into a farm field, so that he could make a U-turn and return on the country road that had been "closed." We both had taken a chance that we could get through. We both had failed. When I asked him what was ahead, he said in heavily accented French: "No pass. No pass."
I imagined sleeping the night in the car as I hit another place I had to detour, and then another. I was grateful when I found myself on a familiar road that would lead me home. I chose the last stretch for its topography -- away from rivers and the lake, toward the higher ground that would be unlikely to flood.
It took 7 1/2 hours to get back to my tiny little house at the center of a town of 800. It should have taken 5 at most. It was just past dusk, and I could see, but not the details that daylight would bring. The garden looked as though I had never been gone. The tomatoes were on the tomato plants, the corn was standing high, and the flowers were blooming yellow and purple. In the morning, I picked squash and an enormous puff ball from the lawn by the lilac tree.
So who do you think I am as I write all this? Are you intrigued or bored? I have never had the "luxury" of meeting my colleagues without seeing them and having them see me.... so what do you "know" about me now?
The Environmental Autobiography is a portrait of the places we live (and work, and heal, and learn, and play), and the manner in which these places mark us, impact our values for place. How does the ritual of stacking change every night tell you something about my father? How does the knowledge that I grew up on the corner of Washington Square Park make you think of me? And the idea that there is a garden where I live now, in a town of 800? What does the story of wind and water make you think?
Here's what I know of you... you are eager. You have chosen this because you are willing to take risks. You want to do something that hasn't been done before. We have struggled with the technology of broken connections. One of your colleagues asked me to "forgive her persistence." I like persistence. I admire it.
Here's what I know of you. I know there are three men and 7 women. I know you have names that suggest some experience of other cultures though you may all have grown up in New York.
Here's what I know of you. You have professional backgrounds to bring to the table.
What I don't know is what motivates you. What I don't know is what it is that you want from this course and this curriculum. What I don't know, yet, is what you have to teach.
I am looking forward to your "voices"--in your blogs and in person. We have a lot to learn together.
I was expecting to meet you on Monday. I was expecting that we would get to know each other as colleagues and friends. Instead of standing in a classroom somewhere on the west side of Manhattan, I was weaving through roads beside muddy cornfields, some submerged in five to 6 feet of water, roiling from the Battenkill River.
I followed the route the GPS picked for me, up through Paramus' shopping corridor and the land of cheap(er) gas where they still clean the windshield for you. I was routed to the Palisades where I hadn't been since I was a girl, driving with my father whose love for the car was exceeded only by his need for ritual. He stacked the change from his pockets in size order every night. He scooped the excess butter from the holes in his bread and used it on other areas. He has been gone some 15 years now. And my mother is not well.
That's why I was in New York--along with meeting you. I was there to help her with some medical procedures. And I was sitting on the couch in the apartment I grew up in while I wrote to you. I have always been a New Yorker, even when I have tried to leave it behind. And I know the view outside the single pane windows over the park as well as I know anything in my life. I listened to the storm from Irene come in at 5 in the morning. I heard it on the metal housing of the air conditioner. I watched the clouds on Sunday as the wind picked up, and yes, I walked to the Hudson. I needed the air. I lay down on a bench in Hudson Park and watched the clouds roll over me. I walked back through the west village and had lemon granita in a place I have gone to since I was a teenager. I walked back to the apartment and packed.
I left at midday and wound through roads choked with traffic, and a highway that was startlingly empty. I wound my way around barriers at tiny bridges over brooks that had become rivers. I watched the driver of an 18-wheeler back up, his rig of wood shavings for animals slanted uphill into a farm field, so that he could make a U-turn and return on the country road that had been "closed." We both had taken a chance that we could get through. We both had failed. When I asked him what was ahead, he said in heavily accented French: "No pass. No pass."
I imagined sleeping the night in the car as I hit another place I had to detour, and then another. I was grateful when I found myself on a familiar road that would lead me home. I chose the last stretch for its topography -- away from rivers and the lake, toward the higher ground that would be unlikely to flood.
It took 7 1/2 hours to get back to my tiny little house at the center of a town of 800. It should have taken 5 at most. It was just past dusk, and I could see, but not the details that daylight would bring. The garden looked as though I had never been gone. The tomatoes were on the tomato plants, the corn was standing high, and the flowers were blooming yellow and purple. In the morning, I picked squash and an enormous puff ball from the lawn by the lilac tree.
So who do you think I am as I write all this? Are you intrigued or bored? I have never had the "luxury" of meeting my colleagues without seeing them and having them see me.... so what do you "know" about me now?
The Environmental Autobiography is a portrait of the places we live (and work, and heal, and learn, and play), and the manner in which these places mark us, impact our values for place. How does the ritual of stacking change every night tell you something about my father? How does the knowledge that I grew up on the corner of Washington Square Park make you think of me? And the idea that there is a garden where I live now, in a town of 800? What does the story of wind and water make you think?
Here's what I know of you... you are eager. You have chosen this because you are willing to take risks. You want to do something that hasn't been done before. We have struggled with the technology of broken connections. One of your colleagues asked me to "forgive her persistence." I like persistence. I admire it.
Here's what I know of you. I know there are three men and 7 women. I know you have names that suggest some experience of other cultures though you may all have grown up in New York.
Here's what I know of you. You have professional backgrounds to bring to the table.
What I don't know is what motivates you. What I don't know is what it is that you want from this course and this curriculum. What I don't know, yet, is what you have to teach.
I am looking forward to your "voices"--in your blogs and in person. We have a lot to learn together.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Getting wet...
It has been a wild day. I didn't sleep well, waking frequently to listen to the drops of rain on the metal housing of the air conditioner. I expected the rain to come on harder, and to be partnered with wind. Instead it seemed half-hearted, and my fears that the old single pane glass would be sprung from the metal frames seemed foolish.
It was only later that the winds came. They arrived in the afternoon, like a late-comer arriving at a party when everyone else has gone. I could hear them rattling the northern and western windows, the ones over Washington Square Park, and I longed for the air, but didn't dare test the old hooks at the base of the frames.
I had been longing for a walk, having been cooped in the apartment for what seemed like days, and when I went downstairs I knew that I would end up somehow at the river.
It was only later that the winds came. They arrived in the afternoon, like a late-comer arriving at a party when everyone else has gone. I could hear them rattling the northern and western windows, the ones over Washington Square Park, and I longed for the air, but didn't dare test the old hooks at the base of the frames.
I had been longing for a walk, having been cooped in the apartment for what seemed like days, and when I went downstairs I knew that I would end up somehow at the river.
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