A Sense of Place

In which I am rooted.

This tiny beauty, photographed in the Rachel Carson Greenway, which runs near my house, is called Panicledleaf Ticktrefoil. It is a name weightier than the plant itself, and isn’t it wonderful?

I.

I rose this morning early as usual, and went to my desk
But it’s spring,

and the thrush is in the woods,
somewhere in the twirled branches, and he is singing.

And so, now, I am standing by the open door.
And now I am stepping down onto the grass.

I am touching a few leaves.
I am noticing the way the yellow butterflies
move together, in a twinkling cloud, over the field.

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.

Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.

~ Mary Oliver, excerpt from From the Book of Time

Last month my book club read Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s transcendent work of historical fiction. And as I read, it occurred to me that part of the reason I simply can no longer bear to read novels about modern American white people and their problems is that too many such books are deeply lacking a sense of place that situates the story in the natural world, and I miss that sense so much when it is absent that I cannot enjoy the book fully. (Plus, stories about white privilege are deeply annoying.)

But Hamnet is not like that. Consider this paragraph, for example: 

She has reached the part of the forest she was aiming for. Fight through the dense tangle of branches and brambles and juniper bushes. Go over the stream, past a thicket of holly trees, which give the only color in the winter months. And then there is a clearing of sorts, where sunlight penetrates, creating a thick fleece of green grass, in circular patters, the curved fronds of ferns. There is an almost horizontal tree here, an immense fir, felled like a giant in a story, its roots splayed out,  its reddish trunk held up in the forked branches of other trees, supported by its lesser neighbors.

It is not just that this flora is familiar; even if I knew none of these trees and plants, the book would feel as if it was missing something vital without such descriptions. And besides, in these days of Google, how easy is it to search a plant or bird or animal, so that the words of the book burst off the page in a flurry of leaves and scales and feathers and fur? Reading Richard Powers’ towering novel, The Overstory, took me so much longer than even its 512 page length required, because I spent so much time eagerly researching the trees that appeared as minor and major characters throughout. When I was an elementary school teacher, we taught students to form a “mind picture” as they read, as a tool to help make sense of the book. But how can a mind picture emerge without the names of species to add color and life? It seems impossible.

This, of course, is also why Mary Oliver’s poetry is so essential to me. Each of her poems is situated exquisitely in a place, and the marriage of her philosophy, her keen eye and exceptional ability to pay attention, the natural world itself, and the words she weaves into beauty, is - as far as I’m concerned - an unparalleled union. (The unsmiling and desk-bound critics who deride her work as plebian, can, in my humble opinion, shove it.)

I imagine some part of this bent comes from growing up with two naturalists as parents, especially because my dad wrote beautifully and frequently on this theme (for some exquisite examples, see Ehrenfeld, David. Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium. Oxford University Press, 1995). And my mom, in the Wetlands Ecology class she taught, would offer extra credit on the final exam each semester to anyone who could name a movie with a swamp in it. She was forever hounding her four kids for movies to add to her list of acceptable answers, and we all tried to oblige, even though movies with bogs are pretty rare. And sure, the question was a fun way to make her students smile during a test, but I am certain she believed it served a more vital purpose too, namely to help them pay attention to how the natural world is present - or, sadly, absent - in the stories we tell and the stories we consume. 

It is easy nowadays, of course, to miss the critically important ways in which our ecosystems situate us in the world. When you live in a landscape of chemically-assisted lawns and pots of flowers severed from their sources and wildness made mild by intentional monocultures, then maybe you never learn to miss what you never really saw. But I am endlessly grateful that my own childhood precluded such myopia, and - as I’ve written about before - I’m doing my best to prevent my girls from growing up with similar blinders.

Brookside Gardens

And so what is the (recent) natural history of my life? My grief - although I carry it everywhere - truly resides at Great Falls, as I wrote about in June, and at Brookside Gardens, the botanical gardens near my home. I can visit one and let the pain wash over me without drowning, while the other is still too much a tidal wave. There, every red-eared slider and weeping willow and flock of geese skimming over the surface of the pond is a thorn in my heart, and so I stay away and miss it from a distance.

And what about my joy? That is situated in the Rachel Carson Greenway, with its laurels and sassafras and tulip poplars and sycamores and marcescent beech trees and - yes! - panicledleaf ticktrefoils and cardinals and blue jays and downy woodpeckers (and pileated too, rarely seen but present) and rat snakes and garter snakes and swallowtail butterflies (and the invasives - microstegium and fig buttercup and bamboo) and thousands of other species, and also it lives in the other forests near Silver Spring, Maryland where I love to roam.

And of course my grief and my joy wouldn’t disappear if I left these places, but some piece of each would always stay there, swirling around the waters and the land like spirits. Because in some essential way, home is the flora and fauna of the place where my heart resides, makes memories, fills and shreds.

I am curious to know whether others feel the way I do - that their lives are intertwined with their landscapes, and that a story without roots is a weightless thing. Or is it a function of my childhood? Honestly, I cannot tell you why I believe this need for emplacement is so vital. I’ll leave the explanations and philosophy to the original and modern Thoreaus and Muirs. All I can say is that it is essential, and that it sparks in me a wild curiosity. So: What is the natural history of your life? I want to know…