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Ronni Bennett writes the blog Time Goes By, a chronical of what it's really like to grow older as well as a discussion of the issues those who have grown older (or, the rest of us who are growing older) face or may face. I've been reading her blog for a while; and recently, she realized she had been, basically, forced into retirement before she was ready, and she made the decision to give up her current (very desirable) home for something more suited/affordable. Consequently, she started A Sense of Place, a blog about the process of deciding where to go and going there.
She makes the point that people, especially older and younger (not so much the mid-range "adults" or at least perhaps more of us don't admit it) tend to be very attached to place and comforted by the familiar. This makes a great deal of sense to me, on many levels.
I was born in California, but I grew up in Oregon - I was still a baby when we moved here and I left only for vacations until I went away to college. I liked it at college - it was a nice enough place - but there was a part of me that knew I was going back to Oregon. Not "where will the good jobs for me be? where would I like to go?" - I never thought of it as an adventure to go somewhere else, as I know that some other people did. I wanted to go home, and home was Oregon (if not my parents' house, which I think they would have objected to as a long-term solution).
And then we didn't go there. We went to Wisconsin - Scott's home - and tried to find jobs in the area, particularly in Minneapolis actually. I wonder what my life would have been like, if we'd succeeded? Different, but I think probably just as good. Had that happened, I might well still be living there and have the same attachment (after what would now be almost a decade) to that area as I do to this. But the employers were not hiring us - they had more applicants than they could shake a stick at, and could afford to hire more-qualified people than wet-behind-the-ears college students. And by such simple margin things are decided - we drove out to Oregon to stay with my parents a while and continue our job search here.
I was sorry for Scott, who had had the same homing instinct I did; but for myself, I was glad, to come home to a place whose rhythms and orders I knew so well. Relatively soon after we moved back, we both had jobs (he first). We rented a townhouse in Tigard, the first time I had lived in a city. I adapted surprisingly quickly - as I often do to changes in residence (even going to college took only a couple months, and that was in an unfamiliar state).
Growing up with my parents, I lived in the country. And I had missed that at the townhouse. The convenience of the city near to hand - that was great. To walk to stores, that was wonderful. But there was no flowing water outside my door except in the gutters. Nature was confined to a few carefully-tended and patterned flower beds, pretty, but no more. And so when we started this house search, one of our criteria was to see if we could get something that was in the country, or seemed to be, but was near to things. I think we succeeded, somewhat in spite of ourselves.
And we moved, and it was (as moving things is) a pain in the backside, but very soon this new house was home. It's why the saga of the house-repainting was so very upsetting to me - because the house, in that time, ceased to really feel like home. It felt instead like some sort of threat, because of its location, a danger we should get rid of. I still have the feeling we will have to move again at some point. The neighborhood is suburban and the actions and results have told me louder than words that our values and theirs are at odds. Sooner or later there will be some other stupidity, and another...I am still a little braced when I come home, sometimes, content mostly when I am within my walls. I want to live in my house; but I don't want to live in my neighborhood. I have a lawn, but no desire to look out at it, because there are houses out there who have people in them who were part of that petty mess.
I think I have had all my life a strong attachment to a sense of place. It is why that mess put me so off-balance and continues to do so, because it encroached on my feeling of belonging - in my very own home. But it is not the home I attach to the most, though having some sense of 'safety' in it matters. It is the area around, this portion of the state. And this, I think, is why my rare day out and about Portland (like yesterday) pleases me so much - because it reaffirms my attachment to this place, to my home.
Areas I knew as a child are changing, or have changed. Most of them don't trouble me; once I get used to the new way things are, I am fine with it. The changes in Sherwood trouble me a little - it has grown from a sleepy little bedroom community to a fairly large highway stop with tons of commercial shopping. But I think this troubles me less because it's become foreign (I suspect much of what I remember would, if I drove into town, be very similar to how I remember it - mostly because there were only a few things I ever really saw enough to remember!), but more because it underscores how very commercialized we've become.
This post has gone in several directions. I hope it still makes sense. Even if it doesn't, Ronni's blogs are worth checking out if you haven't. I definitely feel that sense of place, and the dislocation that comes when it's disturbed (by changes, by requirements or attitudes, or just because you have to leave it behind). But not, I think, with the immediacy that she does at this time.
She makes the point that people, especially older and younger (not so much the mid-range "adults" or at least perhaps more of us don't admit it) tend to be very attached to place and comforted by the familiar. This makes a great deal of sense to me, on many levels.
I was born in California, but I grew up in Oregon - I was still a baby when we moved here and I left only for vacations until I went away to college. I liked it at college - it was a nice enough place - but there was a part of me that knew I was going back to Oregon. Not "where will the good jobs for me be? where would I like to go?" - I never thought of it as an adventure to go somewhere else, as I know that some other people did. I wanted to go home, and home was Oregon (if not my parents' house, which I think they would have objected to as a long-term solution).
And then we didn't go there. We went to Wisconsin - Scott's home - and tried to find jobs in the area, particularly in Minneapolis actually. I wonder what my life would have been like, if we'd succeeded? Different, but I think probably just as good. Had that happened, I might well still be living there and have the same attachment (after what would now be almost a decade) to that area as I do to this. But the employers were not hiring us - they had more applicants than they could shake a stick at, and could afford to hire more-qualified people than wet-behind-the-ears college students. And by such simple margin things are decided - we drove out to Oregon to stay with my parents a while and continue our job search here.
I was sorry for Scott, who had had the same homing instinct I did; but for myself, I was glad, to come home to a place whose rhythms and orders I knew so well. Relatively soon after we moved back, we both had jobs (he first). We rented a townhouse in Tigard, the first time I had lived in a city. I adapted surprisingly quickly - as I often do to changes in residence (even going to college took only a couple months, and that was in an unfamiliar state).
Growing up with my parents, I lived in the country. And I had missed that at the townhouse. The convenience of the city near to hand - that was great. To walk to stores, that was wonderful. But there was no flowing water outside my door except in the gutters. Nature was confined to a few carefully-tended and patterned flower beds, pretty, but no more. And so when we started this house search, one of our criteria was to see if we could get something that was in the country, or seemed to be, but was near to things. I think we succeeded, somewhat in spite of ourselves.
And we moved, and it was (as moving things is) a pain in the backside, but very soon this new house was home. It's why the saga of the house-repainting was so very upsetting to me - because the house, in that time, ceased to really feel like home. It felt instead like some sort of threat, because of its location, a danger we should get rid of. I still have the feeling we will have to move again at some point. The neighborhood is suburban and the actions and results have told me louder than words that our values and theirs are at odds. Sooner or later there will be some other stupidity, and another...I am still a little braced when I come home, sometimes, content mostly when I am within my walls. I want to live in my house; but I don't want to live in my neighborhood. I have a lawn, but no desire to look out at it, because there are houses out there who have people in them who were part of that petty mess.
I think I have had all my life a strong attachment to a sense of place. It is why that mess put me so off-balance and continues to do so, because it encroached on my feeling of belonging - in my very own home. But it is not the home I attach to the most, though having some sense of 'safety' in it matters. It is the area around, this portion of the state. And this, I think, is why my rare day out and about Portland (like yesterday) pleases me so much - because it reaffirms my attachment to this place, to my home.
Areas I knew as a child are changing, or have changed. Most of them don't trouble me; once I get used to the new way things are, I am fine with it. The changes in Sherwood trouble me a little - it has grown from a sleepy little bedroom community to a fairly large highway stop with tons of commercial shopping. But I think this troubles me less because it's become foreign (I suspect much of what I remember would, if I drove into town, be very similar to how I remember it - mostly because there were only a few things I ever really saw enough to remember!), but more because it underscores how very commercialized we've become.
This post has gone in several directions. I hope it still makes sense. Even if it doesn't, Ronni's blogs are worth checking out if you haven't. I definitely feel that sense of place, and the dislocation that comes when it's disturbed (by changes, by requirements or attitudes, or just because you have to leave it behind). But not, I think, with the immediacy that she does at this time.
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The minute I got here, I understood for the first time what it was like to bond with a place. To love a place. It's fascinating to read about what it's like to always have had a such a strong sense of place.
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I know the air here, and the rhythms of the day. I know the different flavors of the rain, and the sound of it coming down. I know the line of the horizon, and what is a mountain and what is a hill (which is not at all the same assessment made of those words in Iowa!). There's a feeling of spirit, of alive-ness, to this area for me, as if I am in rhythm with the place, as if there is something common between us.
I could move houses again within the area, and I'd still be home. But I wonder how long it would take to think of it as coming home, if I moved away from the northwest.
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We have now lived in Oregon for 29 years and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I think Julie has the same bond, though she shows it a bit differently. Once, when I was contemplating taking a new job in New Mexico, she said that was fine with her, but how was I planning on moving Sally the cow? I suspect Laura wouldn't have like the change either.
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