People lose places in many ways. Sometimes places just disappear (beneath an artillery barrage or a new lake, for example); sometimes they’re altered by development or disaster to the point of being unrecognizable; sometimes they’re walled off by political repression. If you escape North Korea, for example, there’s little chance you’ll ever return. Refugees, emigrants, upwardly mobile strivers: all may or must leave behind the place from which they came, and may be left grieving the loss. The typical middle-class person loses places frequently: Americans move an average of about 12 times in their lives.
I feel place loss or place grief poignantly, and I often move through or baste in images and body memories of places I've lived: Cottondale, AL, for example; or a series of villages in southern PA: Seven Valleys (where I rented a house on an emu farm), Glen Rock (where I lived on a big house on a hill with a large step-family), New Freedom (where I rented a little house next to a meadow after a divorce). I remember the local terrain and vegetation; the look of the world on local drives; specific objects in specific rooms in specific houses and apartments; a blizzard; a power outage; the music that was playing; the feel of the air.
The place you live becomes you: you take in its air and water, get its dirt on and in you; its microorganisms enter your biome. We respire in cooperation with the local plants, maybe eat from the garden or the local orchard. We’re physically composed out of the places we inhabit, and we’re in part emotionally composed that way as well, made to be what we are by where we are. We’re not fully distinct from our places. Finding them is finding parts of ourselves, and losing them is losing bits of our being.
This morning, I'm right in the middle of moving from the house where I've lived since 2012. That's the longest I've been anywhere, despite the fact that all I really wanted was to find a single home place and remain there. But like a lot of people I ended up moving many times (maybe I got my own 12), for reasons both professional and personal. The career was a real struggle, and the marriages too, and every change in employment or partnership entailed a change in residence. Perhaps I ended up feeling pretty pushed around, or like I was always in danger of getting pushed out, extruded, exiled.
I love the little house that Jane Irish I are leaving (the movers came June 28; today on the 29th we're camping in an empty house). It's a brick one-room schoolhouse built in the 1870s outside of the tiny town of York Springs, modestly re-made into a residence after the school was decommissioned in 1958 (the year I was born). I've met two people who were students here at Harbold's School, and a man whose wife taught here. It's on the northern edge of the "South Mountain Fruit Belt": Adams County produces 70 percent or so of Pennsylvania's apples and we are surrounded by orchards and fruit.
It's a rural place, and that's really what I've been looking for at least since Cottondale, 1992. As I tool about after these years, I have the notion that I know every tree, every pothole, every bird, every hill, every structure. And lately the thought has occurred again and again: it's unlikely that I’ll ever see this again. I shocked myself the other day by starting to cry as I headed out along Bushey School Road toward the local ice cream stand (I'm not really a crier). And speaking of the D&S ice cream stand: what about all the cool little things we found around here over the last decade, all the local knowledge we've built up, all the familiar faces?
I remember when I first arrived in and explored this region; I remember what it was like the first time I saw all these things round here. And now it's the last!
I will come back! I tell myself. And I’ve returned occasionally to the places I've lived. In Nashville one time, I visited the little house where Rachael and I raised two kids. From time to time people have knocked on the door at a place where I was living and told me that they grew up in that house (or went to this school), or raised a family here. It's an odd feeling, showing someone their very own place as it's been transformed, partly under your auspices, or partly by your own personality. But I think the desire to return is a familiar feeling.
When someone shows up at my door like that, I understand why they want to be there: the feeling of loss and return, grief and joy, flows and eddies of memory, its floods and puddles of emotion. One time a woman told me that when she was growing up in the 1940s in my house on the meadow, there was no plumbing or electricity. The outhouse was still rotting in the back and that made her very happy and very sad.
Perhaps when you go back to the place you grew up or raised a family, the lines drawn on a door frame measuring the heights of the children (perhaps yourself as a child) are still vaguely visible. Maybe people still gather around the little fire pit you dug. Or maybe they've altered everything beyond recognition and you have to deal with the sheer absence of what you knew best.
There's a great country song about visiting the home where you grew up: Miranda Lambert's The House that Built Me. My daughter (also a Jane) loves that song, though it made her cry for a long time every time it came on. She was thinking about our big house on the hill in Glen Rock. We've tooled around together in that region (though not for a couple of years now), remembering a thousand events and people and places. It's grievous but also healing. But now I have those 12 and more places to which I need to return. I'm not sure basting in memory is going to help me in the present. I can't seem to help it, though.
I lived from birth to 18 in a house on Livingston St. in Chevy Chase, DC. I loved that house, and have vivid images of each room as well as a kind of emotional vibe or atmosphere of scent and light. My parents retired as school teachers in 1983 (I was 25), bought a place in rural Virginia, and put their house on the market. My younger brother Adam was good with money, and desperately wanted to buy it from them (he’d never lived anywhere else).
He tried many different ways to make it work, but couldn’t. In the familiar fashion, the house that my parents bought with my dad's salary as a junior reporter in 1958 had become unaffordable by the 1980s. None of the next generation would’ve been able to buy a house in Chevy Chase, and none of us have. Selling that house was how my parents afforded the farm they bought. But losing the house on Livingston St. also contributed to Adam's worsening depression and drug addiction; he died in 1991 of a heroin overdose, but maybe also of place loss.
The last time I swung by that house, it seemed like everything had changed: it was re-landscaped with many additions and improvements. I got a little angry, though I know I had no justification for it. It's been 10 years now since I went back.
I’m proposing that there should be a name in English for this. It's not exactly, or not only, homesickness. You might be homesick when you're traveling or staying somewhere else for awhile. But you can “placegrieve” for somewhere that you haven't been for decades. Now I feel the accumulation of losses, not just a desire for return to a specific place. It grows to be a pervasive mood of “placeloss” or “placegrief,” as we scatter places behind us where we will never be again, or never in the same way.
Loving your world, like loving a person, carries with it the possibility or the inevitability of loss, grief, an absence that can become an overwhelming burden on a day like this.
But I don't regret the poignancy of my own connection to places, which has been one of the most vivid and enduring features of my life, a kind of emotional tone that now tints everything. I don't think I could’ve done otherwise: I fall for places involuntarily; or, I try to love the place where I am, and I work at it pretty hard, whether I want to or not. Even if I know I should hold back because no home endures forever and “placeloss” hurts every time, I love the place I am after awhile, almost no matter what it's like. I don't regret that about myself even if it's making me pretty sad right now.
My parents retired as school teachers in 1983 and started a small organic vegetable farm near the Blue Ridge, in Woodville, VA. And Thistle Hill Farm in Woodville is where that moving van is going to drop off all our stuff tomorrow. We keep telling people that we're "moving back to the family farm." Well, that has always been my ideal—a homeplace, though I'm myself no farmer.
I grew up in Chevy Chase, not Woodville. But I've been going there since my parents moved in. My three brothers and my step-father are all buried there, and my mother (who just turned 100) and I will be. It's not exactly going home again, and maybe you can't, really, as Wolfe says. But it's close as I've come, I suppose. And I intend to pass that farm on to my kids. I don't now if it's possible to really make a home place now, with the economy and society being what they are. But I’m still grieving places, and still trying.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
