gathering a sense of place

I was listening to this episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge, A Sense of Place, while doing the dishes this week (eight painful loads by hand). I loved the segments with Terry Tempest Williams describing her sense of belonging to the "interior west" and communing with the prairie dogs in southern Utah, but I also was very interested in what Scott Russell Sanders had to say about the mythology of settling the American frontier, and how the process continues to shape attitudes in the American culture towards the natural world. I jotted down this little nugget:
"It's as though the very amplitude of America - the bounty of this country, the abundance of fish and fur and trees and, just, land - that very abundance inspired a kind of recklessness and wastefulness...and greed, I suppose. The opposite kind of landscape, a landscape that's very hard and grudging and heavily used, might have inspired quite different qualities in us."


Watercolor by Karl Bodmer, image from PBS.

Image from the American Museum of Photography.

I absolutely gobble this kind of stuff up. Not only does it encapsulate one of those great conundrums of history, it can also apply so aptly to how we think of space. You know, small-space living, reducing and reusing, simplifying, economizing. And all that jazz. It reminded me so much of this little gem of an article - because you can't really talk about abundance without talking about wealth, and I adore little instances like this where simplicity meets thrift meets conservation.


Eco-friendly low-income housing in the Bronx, image from the New York Times.

The podcast had another great segment featuring Jerry Apps, a "rural historian and chronicler of country life" (!!!). He spoke, essentially, about his work in tracing the genealogy of land, which is so, so interesting to me. How I wish that every plot of land you ever lived on, not to mention every piece of vintage clothing or antique jewelry you acquired, came with its own little genealogical history. This ties nicely to the book I'm currently reading, The Monsters of Templeton, which is the perfect mostly-fictional example of a genealogy of the land...the land happening to be a fictionalized town borrowing elements of a fictionalized town conjured up by a real-life famous Author of the Canon (dead white guy) based on a real-life American town (Cooperstown, NY) which also happens to be the real-life hometown of the real-life author (young newly-MFA'd female first-time novelist) - and the genealogy happening to be the main character's (fictional) search through generations of her (fictional) family tree, digging through fake historical research, letters, and memories of her ancestors, some of whom are based on Dead White Guy's actual fictional characters and fictionalized versions of his real-life relatives. Got all that? Yeah. Kudos to Lauren Groff, because creativity like that, layers upon layers of plot convolutions, just blows my mind.

...Which is to say, ahem, that all of this has had me thinking about my own "sense of place." I tend to do this a lot anyhow. Once I've articulated my thoughts on this place I happened to have found myself living, and why I adore it, I will devote a separate blog to it. (Quite possibly coinciding with the state's own little holiday, coming up this weekend.)

Tonight, I have more important matters to attend to. Cameron and I are making Reese's peanut butter cup s'mores around the fire pit in his parents' backyard, and then I have a little dexterous cocker spaniel to babysit at my mom's. Happy weekends.