{"id":1583,"date":"2016-02-29T10:24:29","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T16:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lostpineslife.com\/?p=1583"},"modified":"2016-09-19T16:35:41","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T21:35:41","slug":"thoughts-about-loving-a-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lostpineslife.com\/?p=1583","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts About Loving a Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote this last week after a visit to \u00a0my childhood home. These are my thoughts about \u00a0“loving a place.”<\/p>\n

Loving a Place<\/h2>\n

\u201cA 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.\u201d–<\/strong>Joan Didion “In the Islands,” The White Album (1979).<\/i><\/p>\n

Joan Didion was referring to writers.\u00a0Certain places are so compellingly immortalized in fiction that it’s almost impossible\u00a0to see them any other way.\u00a0 Think of\u00a0 Hemingway’s Paris, Kipling\u2019s India, and Mark Twain\u2019s Mississippi River. \u00a0I came across Didion\u2019s quote while searching online \u201cloving a place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of the articles I found in my search related to travel.\u00a0 I certainly have experienced falling in love with places travelled. \u00a0In the traveller’s way, I love the island of Kauai\u2014green, steep, spiritual, stunningly beautiful, flowing with water. \u00a0I love the island of Alonissos in Greece\u2014aqua crystal sea wherever you turn, winding paths through silvery olive trees. \u00a0 When I was a child, I loved a ranch near Utopia, Texas I visited with my family.\u00a0 It was rough and lovely with a clear, rocky stream.\u00a0 I cried when we left knowing I would never be back.<\/p>\n

These places are special, a good fit, beautiful\u2014places where I could wake up every morning of my life and marvel at how fortunate I was to be there for another day.\u00a0 I could give facts to support why they are special, but place-love is an emotion not a decision; it\u2019s a deep and spiritual resonance.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I returned to the place I loved first\u2014my childhood home from the very beginning.\u00a0 That love is a different kind of love for a place.\u00a0 It\u2019s a deep, familiar love, intertwined with family love, familiarity, and memory. \u00a0My parents, my two sisters, and my brother moved there just before\u00a0I was born and brought me home from from the hospital to a pink nursery with big windows and pine floors. \u00a0Tall pines grew in the sandy soil next to sweet gum, hickory, oak, and dogwood. \u00a0My mother planted azaleas everywhere, and daffodils, and sweet peas. \u00a0 A creek ran along one side teeming with tadpoles, minnows, and crawfish. \u00a0I dug in the sand with kitchen spoons, and mined red clay to make bowls for my dolls. \u00a0 The grass was cool and deep, and my brother and I ran barefoot in the dusk catching jars of fireflies for\u00a0lanterns. \u00a0At night the chorus of frogs and toads comforted me when the sashes of my dresses fluttered in the shadows of the open closet.<\/p>\n

I knew that place intimately, tree by tree. \u00a0I knew the stones in the creek, the four-o’clocks, the roses. \u00a0I peeled the petals off fallen camellia buds and launched them spinning down the creek. I collected acorns and sweet gum balls and perfect pine cones for who knows what reason. \u00a0I ate purple figs off a huge fig tree and cracked walnuts on the driveway and picked out the meat with my fingernails.<\/p>\n

Whenever I felt cranky, bored or afraid, I \u00a0went outside and was comforted.<\/p>\n

When I stopped by my childhood home yesterday, where the current owners were holding a garage sale, I felt sad and possessive.\u00a0 What could they know of this place that they bought to re-decorate and \u201cflip\u201d once my mother found it too far to walk from living room to bedroom and to hard to balance on the soft grass?\u00a0 They don\u2019t know the history, the love, the little girl or her treasures, all of us and all of our treasures \u00a0 I checked for a special tree, and there it was, still standing.\u00a0 I saw a lone, tall camellia bush blooming red.\u00a0 I saw sandy soil in bare patches where the thick San Augustine grass had given up it\u2019s hold.<\/p>\n

If Joan Didion is right, if\u2014 \u201cA 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\u201d\u00a0\u2014then this place belongs to me, and it always will belong to me, because this place is the story I have written about my childhood. And Little Piney will belong to me because it is the story I am writing about myself now.<\/p>\n

I have been curious about my love for Little Piney, my current home. \u00a0It was love at first sight.\u00a0 I knew this place had to be mine, was already mine; it felt like home.\u00a0 \u00a0 Little Piney has brought me back to myself in some ways, to that little girl soothed and inspired by nature. \u00a0Little Piney has been my spirit mother since my mother died a year and a half ago.<\/p>\n

At Little Piney I return to the timelessness of childhood where dusk and hunger pangs surprise me.\u00a0 I am consumed by curiousity and the pleasure of being outdoors.\u00a0 I\u2019m learning the trees. I know where to find a Painted Bunting or a Kinglet. I know that when the amber dragonflies disappear, the purple dragonflies arrive. I know the feeling of this field and that grove.<\/p>\n

I have learned that when we lose a loved one, grief eventually lands us at acceptance. There we can begin to live fully with that loved one as an ever-present part of ourselves.\u00a0 I am never alone at Little Piney.\u00a0 I am there with my mother and my aunts, my father, and my sister.\u00a0 I am there with a younger version of myself. I am there, and I am home.<\/p>\n

\"Outside
Outside at home, about 4 years old<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote this last week after a visit to \u00a0my childhood home. These are my thoughts about \u00a0“loving a place.” Loving a Place \u201cA 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 ownContinue reading<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,41,260,259],"tags":[122,79,43,261,262,263,81],"class_list":["post-1583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bastrop-lost-pines-nature","category-lost-pines-life","category-nature-and-grief","category-nature-and-the-human-spirit","tag-daughters-grief","tag-grief-and-loss","tag-loss-of-mother","tag-love-of-a-place","tag-loving-a-place","tag-nature-and-grief","tag-nature-and-healing"],"yoast_head":"\nThoughts About Loving a Place - Lost Pines Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What does it mean to" love a place"? 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