Home and place

Snow, sleet, a slight melt and then a hard freeze. I fidgeted nervously half the day till Sue made her way from the airport to my house by public transportation. From my apartment we have an expansive view of the silent city, coated in white, the white coated in ice, brought to a halt by the storm. Schools are closed. Banks are closed. The media tell us, unless we are emergency workers, to stay home. 

Sue brought back over two hundred pictures of the land she grew from, the great Central Valley of California. Looking at them, she said, “I’ve been thinking about landscape, place.” For her these open fields and rolling hills are home. There’s a particular quality of light on grassy, deeply folded hillsides dotted with oaks, some brush. Pale green and blonde-gold grasses, ravines and gullies bristling with blackish-green scrub. Those colors, that vegetation, those softly-rounded shapes, the light and shadow falling on those hills: that’s the landscape of her childhood, and to which she returns again and again. I listen, try to feel what that means. Home. A place. I have always been a migrant, a traveler, a voyager. Anywhere I land can be home, but nowhere calls me back. How is it to feel you have sprung from a landscape?

She stayed there till she was grown, and she goes back multiple times each year, back to the land and to her siblings, and they walk together on the land their mother taught them to love. She returns to those landscapes; scrub jays, magpies, wrens, a raptor hurling itself through a blue sea of sky, nature as she experienced it as a child. She and her siblings learned to walk in that landscape, hiking Yosemite, climbing those cliffs. Walking the wide fields of the valley, eating apricots, peaches, plums, nectarines from the orchards. Their parents gone, they still come together several times a year, she and her twin and their siblings, bound to each other and to the land. I gaze at her pictures of them on the land, hiking, laughing, and I try to imagine that kind of bond. She muses, “I think about refugees leaving the land they grew from. What a terrible, aching loss.” She feels that in her bones. I can only feel it in my imagination.

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