My home and my sense of place for it is not seated necessarily by the jurisdictional lines of my town. I have connections to the towns around me, and the places removed from this geographic region. My sense of place is deeply seated in specific things that I know well. I know well the placid waters of my small vacation home, I know the crickets that chirp in the woods near my house in the heat of summer, I know the mosses that grow on the boulders on behind my house. Not the Latin names but something more powerful, I know the their fealty touch and their beads of cold water that spread on your hands. Thus I can feel connected to places I’ve never known by the things that are there and my memories with these things. I know the feeling of the outer beach at night or the red sunrise in the alpine. I find myself in my past experiences or in new ones that draw me close to what I perceive to be unrecoverable meaning. The stars on the outer beech do not necessarily mean anything specific but in the same sense they mean everything.
There are specific places however that will hold a place in my heart as far as I can know. The conservation land behind my house which holds the trails I biked down with my friends, the rocks we made first ascents on, and the quite woods that calmed my anger, sorrow, and anxieties that every person feels in life.
I connect with the places near me in an ecological sense I know the passing of the seasons. The rate a which things pass I know is ingrained in my memory. And as I grew older I learned slowly of the history of my town and its traditions while working on a seventh generation farm.
I know the culture of my place and they culture the young people of my town carved out for themselves. Whether it was walking through the mile long old train tunnel, hanging out near the giant chair we found in that field or walking out to the lookout at night. We created a culture of exploration and discovery in the little nooks of our small towns. I challenged my friend to find these places and every weekend we were somewhere new on our little “Midnight Runs”. There might have been a little trespassing but there was worse a bunch of country/suburban kids could be doing.
The big chair
I recognize that my town is unique in its area, it is a town that use to be very agricultural and has since been reforested, it has large swaths of forested land. The lack of development compared to the other tightly packed Massachusetts towns right next to me, brought my closer to natural spaces, I became to love the conserved lands even more with the towns near me developing to no ends. I remember my driving instructor who was an old man telling me how all the towns around me use to look just like mine only 30 years ago. I have wanted to preserve these natural places since my realize that they are not necessarily permanent.
The natural places that are familiar to me support me in a way nothing else does. It a large part of my very soul. I would not hesitate to say the natural places of my youth are my religion. They have taught me patience, perseverance, humility, kindness, and tranquility. I do not “ignore the truck” but my sense of place especially that connected to natural places, fuels my well being. And I am sure I will develop it here in the cedars of the Lake Champlain shores.