A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.
― Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979
I dream in places. Generally when I wake, I have only a hazy recollection of plot or people. What lingers is a sense of place. Although Longfellow High School in Kearney, Nebraska was closed and locked up years before my time (save for the north end which housed our junior high music and geography classes), I’d peered through the windows on many occasions, imagining what lay beyond the entrance and up the staircase. And in the decades since, I’ve dreamt about being in that grand building, waking to carry the scent of wood polish and old books with me throughout the day. This place belongs to me, for I’ve been one who’s claimed it hardest and remembered it most obsessively.
Years ago when we discussed ageism in a Human Relations course I taught for educators, I used Geraldine Page’s final movie, A Trip to Bountiful. I’ve probably seen this movie a dozen times, and each time, I find myself as moved by Page’s performance as I was the first time. An aging woman stuck in a city apartment with her adult son and whiny daughter-in-law, Page’s character spends most of the day, and often most of the night, in a rocking chair by the window overlooking the yard and street beyond. Time and again, she begs her son to take her back to Bountiful, the small Texas town where she’d grown up, married, and raised him. Her yearning is palpable throughout the film. She dreams and daydreams of the place that’s defined and grounded her. Her son, a man bent on climbing the corporate ladder and providing a better life for his mother and wife, ignores her pleas. Why do you want to go back to that old place? he asks. There’s nothing there any more.
When she can no longer bear being pent up in that apartment, she decides to run away–again. This time, however, she not only makes it to the bus station but actually purchases a ticket, boards the bus, and departs before her son can find her and take her home. As she travels through the rural Texas countryside, she hums the hymns that have sustained her through the droughts of life. She tells her seat mate that she’s happier than she’s been for a long time. Because she’s going home to feel the soil between her fingers, to hear the birds, and to turn her face to the sun again. She’s going back to the place she believes will jump-start her soul and give her the will to return to the city, to commit her final days to living in that small apartment.
When her son finally catches up with her on the porch of her now dilapidated house, she’s smiling and greets him with, I’m home, son. I got my trip home. He chides her for taking such a risk–traveling alone in precarious health–but she tells him that it’s enough that she’s returned one final time, that this trip will carry her happily through the rest of her days. As she looks around one last time before getting into his waiting car, she reminds herself that when all the people are gone, the land and sky, the birds and coastal breezes will remain.
I understand this. As my father and his grandmother understood this. The open prairie of Nebraska and the timbered hills of Iowa become the protagonists of our stories. It’s enough that they will remain long after the people we love have gone and the memories we’ve made have faded. In his novel, A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway writes:
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
The names of places dignify those villages, rivers, roads, and fields where so many died as casualties of war. These places make the sacrifices of war real. They anchor the abstract notions of things like glory and courage in the concrete: stone, soil, water, wood. It’s no wonder that we return to these places and walk their hallowed ground. It’s no wonder that we say their names with reverence and wonder. Our most important stories inhabit these places. And they rise from the ash heap, recover, and remain when all else has disappeared. This is the power of place.
In her novel, Black Beauty, Anna Sewell contends that [i]t is good people who make good places. Having just returned from a visit to my family home in Kearney, I’m buoyed with a familiar sense of joy that emanates from this place. I walked into the closet of my childhood bedroom which spreads magically under the eaves, creating a private nook for book-reading and imaginative play. I remembered the hours I spent there in solitary contentment. I laid in bed and saw the room as it had been when I was young: an upright piano along one wall, my mom’s sewing machine on an old desk in the corner, and an ironing board under the east window. I could feel my fingers on the keys. I could hear the rumble of the old, black Singer as my mom guided a piece of fabric under its needle. Good people made this home, and within, good places abound.
In my mind, I can still walk the halls of the many schools I’ve attended as student and teacher. I can look down the aisles of the three-story department store in which I worked during high school and college. And, without thinking, I can tell you just where you’d find a bottle of calamine lotion or a 10-cent glass animal. If I close my eyes, I can climb the spiral staircase up to the balcony of the lighthouse overlooking Harmon Park’s rock garden. And when I’m miles away from and missing home, I can mentally walk the perimeter of our pond and watch sunfish travel through the shallows. I can do this because all these places–real and remembered–are sanctuaries for me.
If [a] place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, as Joan Didion contends, then I find joy in knowing that there are so many places that belong forever to me. If there are others who argue that they claim these places hardest, let it be known that I won’t release them graciously, and I won’t stop visiting them in my dreams.
