As Casey articulated, the body contains place, is “a history of locales” (197.) Not only does the body contain our places; the self does, as well. In “Place, past, and person,” J. E. Malpas works out the deep connection between identity and place. Malpas explores what he calls “Proust’s Principle,” that we are tied to place “not just as remembered only in relation to place, but as being who and what [we] are through [our] inhabiting of places” (176). Malpas continues on this theme, writing that “self conceptualization and the conceptualization of place are both interdependent elements within the same structure. Our identities are thus bound up with particular places or localities through the very structuring of subjectivity and of mental life within the overarching structure of place” (177).
It is not, then, that I merely associate myself with the barn, or that the barn has shaped my experiences growing up; both of these are true, certainly, but not the whole of it. Just as the house is something separate yet inextricable from the rest of the barn, my identity is inextricable from my conception of this place with which I am so closely tied. The very facilities of my mind which allow me to conceive of myself, to have a sense of identity, are the same facilities which allow me to conceive of place in the truest sense of the word (those places which are, as Casey distinguishes them from ‘sites,’ “retrospectively tinged” 198).
Before I left on that November night of my most recent return, I returned to the barn, breathed in the smells of hay, horses, dust, manure, and sweet-feed. For so many winters and summers, that structure had been marked for me most by the swirls of dust-in-light, visible where sunlight would pour into the cracks between planks of wood along the side of the barn, by that familiar smell, by the sound of rain on the tin roof, and by the hundreds of hours of work I must have put in, cleaning stalls, raking the dust into its fishbone pattern, organizing supplies, and doing it all over again the next day.
Satisfied, car-keys in hand, I walked up to the driveway, situated between two of the three fields. Facing away from the barn and towards Clarksburg road, the field where we let the old boys out sprawled down and to my right, and the mares’ field up and to the left. Although it was dark, I could make out the trees that lined each field at the back, the small wooden shelters housing their respective water-troughs, and the low fences that had always given the fields their wonderful dual sense of, at once, security and freedom. They were contained, they were navigable, but they were completely open to the sky, full of grass and hay and trees and wildflowers, honeysuckle in the summer. I had learned to ride, to fall, and remount in the ring and carried that knowledge to the field, I had learned to be strong there, and learned to pass my strength onto my youngest students.
We are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place…when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a crucial role—our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place bound. (Malpas, 177).
Memory of place...gives us space to be precisely because we have been in so many memorable places, enjoyed such intimacy in them, known such pain there as well (Casey, 215).
Finally, I left. But, as I believe arises from the synthesis of Casey and Malpas, the place is as much a part of me as any structure of mental life is; more, because it is contained in both my mind and the place that is my body. Malpas writes that that the search for self is often portrayed as the search for a place. I am extraordinarily lucky in that I found such a place so young, that I have matured with such a strong sense of place, a place moreover in which I was necessarily actively and bodily engaged. The passage of time has woven the barn into my identity, and while I do always feel as if I leave a part of myself behind when I leave the barn, and return to that piece of myself with each return, I intuitively feel Casey’s sense that my body has stored this place, such that if I, tragically, were never to return, it would still remain embedded within me, and continue to grow alongside my own sense of self.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Section V. The House
In discussing what makes a building a dwelling, Heidegger emphasizes the “fourfold,” that is, “earth and sky, divinities and mortals” (149). Each element of the fourfold implicitly calls to mind the other three, yet, as mortals, “we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four” (150). To truly dwell in the fourfold, Heidegger argues, we must preserve and allow each aspect to be itself, to “receive the sky as sky” and “await the divinities as divinities.” Thus, for a building to be a dwelling, it must allow for this fourfold, for to block the fourfold, to interfere with the oneness of the four and also with the nature of each aspect, is to prevent dwelling. Miss Susan’s house is a true dwelling place.
The house is low, one story. The central room is the kitchen. It runs the length of the house, and holds the stovetop, the oven, the magnet-covered refrigerator, a laundry closet, a counter, and the old wood table at which I sat to write, at which I have sat so many times to eat, to talk, to write, to rest my feet after hours of tireless labor. Windows bookend the kitchen (during the day, no lights are necessary in the house; it is as sunny inside as out), and cats are often seen on one side of the window or the other, always wanting to exit or enter the house. Plants decorate every corner; a potted tree near the entrance, a Christmas cactus hanging to the floor by the microwave. When Miss Susan was redoing the kitchen tiles seven years ago, she said she wanted to bring in the sky. The soft gray stone tiles are tinged with and textured with every color—green, blue, pink—all very pale and mellowed into the swirling pattern of the stone. The color differences only appear upon study; at a glance, it is the sky we saw just before sunset, but softer, as if it lost its brilliance when it was brought all the way down to the ground.
To argue that this central room and the rooms surrounding it constitute a dwelling, I must not only defend their sense of the fourfold but what it means to dwell in this context. Heidegger examines the linguistic origins of the word “dwell.” He traces the word through peace, freedom, sparing as returning something to where it ought to be (freeing it), and preserving these senses. Thus, to dwell means “to be at peace, to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature” (149). This does not mean one leads a necessarily easy life, for any life involving the land will encounter some degree of turmoil. It does mean that one must be at peace with dwelling, with being a mortal alive on the earth, as a part of the earth and its creatures, and that a dwelling must provide for this peace, and this sense of connection, and also provide this safety, this preservation that is also freedom.
With the windows, the soft floor, the ever-present green of the plants, and the constant movement in and out of cats and dogs, the kitchen seems to flow outside, yet at once it is a shelter; warm in the winter, cool in the summer as it receives cross-breezes from the open doors and windows, always a place to gather one’s thoughts when the rest of the barn is too much. The lowness of the house prevents it from being an intrusion on the landscape, and the shelter it provides to all beings—human, cat, dog, at times bird, butterfly, even horse—provides it with a deep quality of preservation, of protection. The kitchen alone, as the center of the house and in many ways the nerve-center of the entire barn, allows the house to serve as a dwelling, not only for its permanent residents (human and other) but all who pass through.
The house is close to the shape of a square, with two rooms bridging off on either side of the kitchen. On the one side of the house, the side closer to the barn, is an entry-room/mudroom with another small room branching off it, once an office, now a storage room belonging primarily to the house-cats. This small room at one time served as a stall, when an underweight baby Thoroughbred who would have not survived the winter was sheltered there. The room was bedded with hay and barricaded from the rest of the house by stacks of trunks, but the filly was soon strong enough to jump over the barricade and was often found in the bedroom, gleefully throwing clothes and books and terrifying the dogs. Also on the side is the current office, formerly a sort of den. The back wall of the office is a glass sliding door, always left open as long as the weather allows.
The other side of the house contains the bedrooms—across from the mudroom, Miss Susan’s bedroom, and in front, the guest bedroom. Both rooms are lined with books: books on horses—fact and fiction, volumes of poetry, old National Geographics, history books about World War II, a good slice of the literary canon, a very yellow copy of “The Golden Bough. I have spent many nights on the sunken, flowered couch in the guest bedroom, under a solitary blanket in the summer nights not spent outside, and wrapped in half the quilts in the house in winter. On those cold nights, I am always accompanied by at least one dog, usually Bookie, whose impression of warmth leaves my feet in the morning, dragging me out of bed along with it.
I have never slept better anywhere than I do when visiting the barn. Because natural light and fresh air are so prevalent in every room of the house, I always wake up feeling healthy and deeply rested, even if I have only lain down for a few hours between finishing the evening chores and an extremely late dinner and getting up with the sun to begin work again. On those mornings, the kitchen is always light and smells of coffee, and I drift between breakfast in the kitchen and morning chores outside. As hard as the work can be, nothing is as refreshing as stepping into a large green field first thing in the morning and letting a herd of grateful ponies in to be fed, then returning to the house to put my feet up and drown a mug of coffee. While the house provides shelter and a sense of calm apart from the world around, it cannot be separated from the rest of the barn, so integrated are the experiences of outdoors and indoors, work and rest.
Again, the house at once flows continuously with the outside and provides shelter to all who need it. It is unobtrusive and practical, it is lovely and simple, it is dry and safe, it is full of light and air, and, by virtue of its proximity to the barn and way in which it is absolutely a part of the barn and the barn a part of it, it carries the flavor of the divine that horses bear. It embraces earth and sky, it allows mortals to dwell, and carries a sense of divinity with no pretensions, thus embracing Heidegger’s fourfold. At the same time, it holds many of the place-memories centered around the barn, and is inseparable from both the meanings and the actions of the place.
The house is low, one story. The central room is the kitchen. It runs the length of the house, and holds the stovetop, the oven, the magnet-covered refrigerator, a laundry closet, a counter, and the old wood table at which I sat to write, at which I have sat so many times to eat, to talk, to write, to rest my feet after hours of tireless labor. Windows bookend the kitchen (during the day, no lights are necessary in the house; it is as sunny inside as out), and cats are often seen on one side of the window or the other, always wanting to exit or enter the house. Plants decorate every corner; a potted tree near the entrance, a Christmas cactus hanging to the floor by the microwave. When Miss Susan was redoing the kitchen tiles seven years ago, she said she wanted to bring in the sky. The soft gray stone tiles are tinged with and textured with every color—green, blue, pink—all very pale and mellowed into the swirling pattern of the stone. The color differences only appear upon study; at a glance, it is the sky we saw just before sunset, but softer, as if it lost its brilliance when it was brought all the way down to the ground.
To argue that this central room and the rooms surrounding it constitute a dwelling, I must not only defend their sense of the fourfold but what it means to dwell in this context. Heidegger examines the linguistic origins of the word “dwell.” He traces the word through peace, freedom, sparing as returning something to where it ought to be (freeing it), and preserving these senses. Thus, to dwell means “to be at peace, to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature” (149). This does not mean one leads a necessarily easy life, for any life involving the land will encounter some degree of turmoil. It does mean that one must be at peace with dwelling, with being a mortal alive on the earth, as a part of the earth and its creatures, and that a dwelling must provide for this peace, and this sense of connection, and also provide this safety, this preservation that is also freedom.
With the windows, the soft floor, the ever-present green of the plants, and the constant movement in and out of cats and dogs, the kitchen seems to flow outside, yet at once it is a shelter; warm in the winter, cool in the summer as it receives cross-breezes from the open doors and windows, always a place to gather one’s thoughts when the rest of the barn is too much. The lowness of the house prevents it from being an intrusion on the landscape, and the shelter it provides to all beings—human, cat, dog, at times bird, butterfly, even horse—provides it with a deep quality of preservation, of protection. The kitchen alone, as the center of the house and in many ways the nerve-center of the entire barn, allows the house to serve as a dwelling, not only for its permanent residents (human and other) but all who pass through.
The house is close to the shape of a square, with two rooms bridging off on either side of the kitchen. On the one side of the house, the side closer to the barn, is an entry-room/mudroom with another small room branching off it, once an office, now a storage room belonging primarily to the house-cats. This small room at one time served as a stall, when an underweight baby Thoroughbred who would have not survived the winter was sheltered there. The room was bedded with hay and barricaded from the rest of the house by stacks of trunks, but the filly was soon strong enough to jump over the barricade and was often found in the bedroom, gleefully throwing clothes and books and terrifying the dogs. Also on the side is the current office, formerly a sort of den. The back wall of the office is a glass sliding door, always left open as long as the weather allows.
The other side of the house contains the bedrooms—across from the mudroom, Miss Susan’s bedroom, and in front, the guest bedroom. Both rooms are lined with books: books on horses—fact and fiction, volumes of poetry, old National Geographics, history books about World War II, a good slice of the literary canon, a very yellow copy of “The Golden Bough. I have spent many nights on the sunken, flowered couch in the guest bedroom, under a solitary blanket in the summer nights not spent outside, and wrapped in half the quilts in the house in winter. On those cold nights, I am always accompanied by at least one dog, usually Bookie, whose impression of warmth leaves my feet in the morning, dragging me out of bed along with it.
I have never slept better anywhere than I do when visiting the barn. Because natural light and fresh air are so prevalent in every room of the house, I always wake up feeling healthy and deeply rested, even if I have only lain down for a few hours between finishing the evening chores and an extremely late dinner and getting up with the sun to begin work again. On those mornings, the kitchen is always light and smells of coffee, and I drift between breakfast in the kitchen and morning chores outside. As hard as the work can be, nothing is as refreshing as stepping into a large green field first thing in the morning and letting a herd of grateful ponies in to be fed, then returning to the house to put my feet up and drown a mug of coffee. While the house provides shelter and a sense of calm apart from the world around, it cannot be separated from the rest of the barn, so integrated are the experiences of outdoors and indoors, work and rest.
Again, the house at once flows continuously with the outside and provides shelter to all who need it. It is unobtrusive and practical, it is lovely and simple, it is dry and safe, it is full of light and air, and, by virtue of its proximity to the barn and way in which it is absolutely a part of the barn and the barn a part of it, it carries the flavor of the divine that horses bear. It embraces earth and sky, it allows mortals to dwell, and carries a sense of divinity with no pretensions, thus embracing Heidegger’s fourfold. At the same time, it holds many of the place-memories centered around the barn, and is inseparable from both the meanings and the actions of the place.
Section IV. The Field
So, for this section I turned in several photographs with short captions which corresponded to a hand drawn map of the barn...I will try to figure out how to either post that or explain it better soon :-)
Section III. Sunset
Before I can move on, I must clarify what it is to be at the barn, to truly be a part of the living world, of the place. The body is at work in every aspect of the barn. Whether one is cantering across fields, sweating in a difficult jumping lesson, walking a six-year-old human through the field on ponyback, scrubbing a dirty trough or water-bucket, carrying stacks of hay, raking the floor, currying a horse, or even sitting around a table eating good food and talking, there is a great sense of reciprocity; we work for the horses and the land, and the land the horses provide us with something other-worldly, with that divine wisdom so coolly possessed by horses, with a speed and strength man alone could never achieve, with a dual senses of openness and shelter, real danger and safety.
It has a very simple, perhaps quaint beauty to the visitor—lovely fields, yes, a nice skyline, a well-built barn—but those of us who have invested ourselves in the landscape, who have showered off its dirt at night only to wear it again in the morning, who have suffered injury from falling, who have flown up hills and over jumps, who have, when hungry and impatient for dinner perhaps covertly tasted the horses’ sweet-feed—for us, it can perhaps best be contained in the burning autumn sunsets we catch as we emerge, sweating on our sweating steeds, from hours spent in the woods, in the breath we take as we watch the orange in the moments between the ride and the work of untacking, washing, feeding, and turning out our horses. The barn is in those moments of calm in which the physical beauty of the landscape is magnified a hundred times by the air we pull into our tired lungs, by the salve of those colors on our exhausted arms and legs.
The involvement of the body, the crucial nature of physical work and the physical nature of the more recreational aspects of the barn, call to mind the writings of Edward Casey. Casey discusses the body as a place, as the container of all our locales. Without body-memory, or habit, we would not remember places; the body makes the memory true and complete. Grooming, tacking, untacking, feeding, riding, cleaning; all these actions are stored in my mind, my muscles, as a kind of alternative map to the place. I know my way around the physical dimensions of the barn, and I can physically respond to all its demands. As I have lived the place, it is now a part of me, and myself, a part of it. As the body “forges a sense of attuned space” (193) in a new place, so too does it deepen that sense of attunement in the old. Casey writes that, through the body, the past of a place becomes present; certainly, the memory of my place in my body is a living, omnipresent thing.
It has a very simple, perhaps quaint beauty to the visitor—lovely fields, yes, a nice skyline, a well-built barn—but those of us who have invested ourselves in the landscape, who have showered off its dirt at night only to wear it again in the morning, who have suffered injury from falling, who have flown up hills and over jumps, who have, when hungry and impatient for dinner perhaps covertly tasted the horses’ sweet-feed—for us, it can perhaps best be contained in the burning autumn sunsets we catch as we emerge, sweating on our sweating steeds, from hours spent in the woods, in the breath we take as we watch the orange in the moments between the ride and the work of untacking, washing, feeding, and turning out our horses. The barn is in those moments of calm in which the physical beauty of the landscape is magnified a hundred times by the air we pull into our tired lungs, by the salve of those colors on our exhausted arms and legs.
The involvement of the body, the crucial nature of physical work and the physical nature of the more recreational aspects of the barn, call to mind the writings of Edward Casey. Casey discusses the body as a place, as the container of all our locales. Without body-memory, or habit, we would not remember places; the body makes the memory true and complete. Grooming, tacking, untacking, feeding, riding, cleaning; all these actions are stored in my mind, my muscles, as a kind of alternative map to the place. I know my way around the physical dimensions of the barn, and I can physically respond to all its demands. As I have lived the place, it is now a part of me, and myself, a part of it. As the body “forges a sense of attuned space” (193) in a new place, so too does it deepen that sense of attunement in the old. Casey writes that, through the body, the past of a place becomes present; certainly, the memory of my place in my body is a living, omnipresent thing.
Section II. Little Bennett
The barn is located snuggly at the southern edge of Little Bennett state park, 3,700 acres of woods cut by a wide creeks and rolled over endless hills. The park is also cut by Clarksburg road, which at the time of the park’s creation in 1983 was an established road, but not so trafficked as it is now that suburbs have migrated up past Germantown. Several historical landmarks dot the park. The only one of which I am personally familiar with is the schoolhouse, located by a particularly wide section of creek in which we have often let our horses splash and refresh themselves on hot summer rides. It is a white, clapboard, one-room schoolhouse, established in 1893 and abandoned in the early 1930’s, when the Depression forced the area’s families to relocate.
I do not know the land well on foot. I have walked maybe three quarters of a mile of trail, one summer week when the radio stations named the day “code purple,” surpassing “code red” and not a soul was supposed to stir from the comfort of their air-conditioned home. We spared the horses and went out into the trail ourselves, escaping into the cool of the woods with hand-saws, pruning shears and orange tape to hack a new trail.
I know the land on horseback. It is a higher-up view, an often faster-paced-view. The steep hills are at once more accessible and more dangerous, the creeks gain new meanings both of challenge and of rest, and the sound of hooves and breathing accompanies everything. Trees gain a meaning they do not have to walkers. Branches often hang low enough to merit ducking, and I ride with my head quite literally among the leaves. Tree trunks growing close to the trail can bruise my knees or rip my stirrups from the saddle, and fallen trees demand either jumps or finding a new path.
On horseback, one learns to be aware first of anything that could provide a danger to one's horse, such as holes in the ground, or anything unnatural, such as metal poles or difficult-to-see fence-lines. At the next level are the things that could distract the horse—deer, pedestrians, and in the cases of spookish or “green” horses, squirrels, falling leaves, anything that moves. Then there are the low or protruding branches, the high water, hanging vines—anything a rider might wish to avoid. The beauty of the landscape—and beautiful it is—is the final piece. Its low-down position on the list of one's awarenesses by no means belittles it. I remember the orange mushrooms that grow on tree-trunks and the way the sun illuminates the leaves as it sets after an exhilarating fall ride much better than I do anything related to safety (with the exception of my very memorable missteps). But a rider cannot survive as a mere observer of the landscape; she must know it, scrutinize it, react to its every detail, which in turn deepens the beauty a casual hiker might seek with their Nikon.
My memories of the trail, from which I have been apart too long, are in every one of my senses. Different sections of trail have their own distinct smell, that strongest of memory-senses; here—honeysuckle; there—a smell like that of almonds, but earthier; here—the clean water of the creek, hooves churning up mud, releases a smell of fresh dirt, rotting leaves, and the indescribable living smell of freshwater. Where it smells of honeysuckle or almond, the sky is close to invisible, so thick with branches that we have, on several occasions, been completely sheltered from rain. In the summer, these stretches of trail are a refuge from the heat, and the sweet, flowering smells are thick and pungent, broken up by our own breezes. Sometimes, we ride through blackberry bushes, and as our horses graze or stretch, we lean down and grab handfuls of warm berries, grazing along with our creatures.
By the schoolhouse, where the widest section of creek runs, as well as in the now disappearing fields that border the park and trails by the campsite where girl-scouts sometimes crowd, the sky is completely unobscured; the horizon is free from buildings beyond that simple white schoolhouse, and the horses, in their natural environment, raise their heads and tails, letting their riders know that they are in control here, that they are the gods of this domain.
I do not know the land well on foot. I have walked maybe three quarters of a mile of trail, one summer week when the radio stations named the day “code purple,” surpassing “code red” and not a soul was supposed to stir from the comfort of their air-conditioned home. We spared the horses and went out into the trail ourselves, escaping into the cool of the woods with hand-saws, pruning shears and orange tape to hack a new trail.
I know the land on horseback. It is a higher-up view, an often faster-paced-view. The steep hills are at once more accessible and more dangerous, the creeks gain new meanings both of challenge and of rest, and the sound of hooves and breathing accompanies everything. Trees gain a meaning they do not have to walkers. Branches often hang low enough to merit ducking, and I ride with my head quite literally among the leaves. Tree trunks growing close to the trail can bruise my knees or rip my stirrups from the saddle, and fallen trees demand either jumps or finding a new path.
On horseback, one learns to be aware first of anything that could provide a danger to one's horse, such as holes in the ground, or anything unnatural, such as metal poles or difficult-to-see fence-lines. At the next level are the things that could distract the horse—deer, pedestrians, and in the cases of spookish or “green” horses, squirrels, falling leaves, anything that moves. Then there are the low or protruding branches, the high water, hanging vines—anything a rider might wish to avoid. The beauty of the landscape—and beautiful it is—is the final piece. Its low-down position on the list of one's awarenesses by no means belittles it. I remember the orange mushrooms that grow on tree-trunks and the way the sun illuminates the leaves as it sets after an exhilarating fall ride much better than I do anything related to safety (with the exception of my very memorable missteps). But a rider cannot survive as a mere observer of the landscape; she must know it, scrutinize it, react to its every detail, which in turn deepens the beauty a casual hiker might seek with their Nikon.
My memories of the trail, from which I have been apart too long, are in every one of my senses. Different sections of trail have their own distinct smell, that strongest of memory-senses; here—honeysuckle; there—a smell like that of almonds, but earthier; here—the clean water of the creek, hooves churning up mud, releases a smell of fresh dirt, rotting leaves, and the indescribable living smell of freshwater. Where it smells of honeysuckle or almond, the sky is close to invisible, so thick with branches that we have, on several occasions, been completely sheltered from rain. In the summer, these stretches of trail are a refuge from the heat, and the sweet, flowering smells are thick and pungent, broken up by our own breezes. Sometimes, we ride through blackberry bushes, and as our horses graze or stretch, we lean down and grab handfuls of warm berries, grazing along with our creatures.
By the schoolhouse, where the widest section of creek runs, as well as in the now disappearing fields that border the park and trails by the campsite where girl-scouts sometimes crowd, the sky is completely unobscured; the horizon is free from buildings beyond that simple white schoolhouse, and the horses, in their natural environment, raise their heads and tails, letting their riders know that they are in control here, that they are the gods of this domain.
Section I. Homecoming.
Places and their memory sustain us in our everyday lives, subject as these lives are to fragmentation and rupture of so many sorts (Casey, 198).
I am sitting at the old wood table of Miss Susan’s house, the rhythmic ticking of the clock the only noise for this minute. As soon as the door opens, it will be dogs and people, but for now, there is near silence. My sweatshirt is covered in hay, and bits of hay are stuck to my legs, having somehow gotten between my jeans and my riding pants. My hands smell like dust and horse hair, and my nails are dirty, but the kitchen is pleasantly warm and smells like clean laundry, dogs and lemon. The two old dogs are asleep in the house; Bookie, the terrier, doesn’t move from his white bed, but Tuppence, the ancient Airedale, moves her head and sighs, groans a little in the slow dragging of her head up from the floor. It is only five-thirty, but the windows are black.
An hour ago, I sat bareback on a new horse, a grey-and-white paint quarter horse named Smokey Joe. We were in the blue-stone ring up by the house, at first walking around as I got to know him; he had a barrel like a couch, and if I’d wanted, I could have lain on his neck and been safe. But he also had the energy and curiosity of the ten-year-old he was, and as we moved around the perimeter, he would stop to nuzzle horses in the surrounding fields, or to look at something interesting, before picking up his pace again. The ring is bordered on three sides by fields and on the fourth side by the long driveway. At the back of the fields that border Clarksburg road is a thicket of trees, and beyond the trees are the faintest hint of purple mountain, a small stretch of the Appalachians not visible just a few miles closer to the city than we are located. Once we had warmed up our muscles and gained each other’s trust, I asked for a trot, and was amazed by the smoothness of the gait; bareback, I did not bounce at all, and, happy, I asked for the canter. Cantering is the sort of pure joy and freedom that was lost to the automobile; going ninety in a car, no matter how flashy, is nothing to going thirty on a horse, hearing the one-two-three rhythm, more graceful than a waltz, breathing in dust, feeling at once the power of the muscles and the dangerous closeness of the ground below. It does not matter, this time, that we are in a ring and not on an open trail; as we run forward, the fence-line we turn along is meaningless, we are only and always going forward. As I rode, we watched the low clouds turn a deep purple, pink frames emerging at the edges, until the pink tint spread to cover the bottom of the sky and the dark purple settled as a layer over the pink, the clouds fading from view.
Finishing my ride (it had been over three months for me, so I was tired out well before Smokey), I walked the round-bellied paint down to the barn; first, across the black driveway lined on either side by well-grazed grass, then to the old wooden fence enclosing the barnyard and opening to yet another field—vines grow along one side of the fence, and a small tomato plant nestles in a corner—through the small wooden gate and then, because he was cool and because it was not yet time for dinner, along the fence-line to the field, where I took off his bridle and let him go.
Below us lies the barn itself. Two parts, connected by a small aisle and all roofed in tin, with a small tack/feed shed attached at the front, and a large black water trough by the shed. (Now, the younger Airedales, Rosie and Bella, are inside barking, running back and forth between the kitchen and the bedroom, play fighting, bothering the old Airedale, Tuppence, before falling silent, settling into the tone of the house at nightfall). All of the horses and ponies (save for one paint, Peppy, back from a trail ride and being groomed by his girl, Kaci), are out. I clean the leather bridal, hang it in the tack room. The shed is small, maybe six feet by eight. When you enter from the door, the opposite wall holds a medicine cabinet, a white-board with feeding instructions, and several odds and ends. To the right is a wall covered in saddle racks, all the leather saddles covered in blue and red saddle-blankets. To the left are three large tin feed-bins containing the various forms of feed, and the back wall holds a low blue trunk full of saddle pads, above which hang about a dozen bridle hooks. I hang Smokey’s bridle on the hook nearest the door, the same high metal hook on which I nearly lost an eye three or four summers before. My tack put away (I don’t know when I last used a saddle), I enter the barn and go to the “hayloft,” a sort of large closet of hay held in by a wide metal gate. To the right are six large stalls, three facing towards the barnyard and the house, and three facing towards the back of the barnyard and the field below it, beyond which now stand McMansions flanked by cool blue pools.
Towards the left of the hayloft is an aisle, which leads to the second part of the barn structure, the area we’ve always called the “Pony Palace.” Now, it holds more horses as the demographics have changed, but all the stalls are smaller, closer together. There are the five at the very back, and the four in the middle, creating two small aisles with dust for floors, and a total of three at the very front of the palace, two on one side of the wide connecting aisle and one on the other. The name-plates on the doors, all of them carved into small rectangles of wood, only sometimes match the stall’s current resident. The name-plate reading “Buster-Brown” has moved several times over the last few years, and currently adorns one of the middle-row stalls of the Pony Palace. “Hello Kitty,” once markered onto a sign and decorated with a foam cut-out of the cartoon, is next to his, and “Step’n’Time,” the sign adored with a small carving of a horse-head, is on the stall across.
I climb to the top of the rather depleted stack of hay, grab the top bale, and toss it to the ground. I jump down and get the blade from the hook, hanging as always from a piece of orange twine. Although it is dark by this point, and I have not been to the barn in months, I know where everything is. I cut the orange twine tying the flakes of hay together, and walk through the barn distributing hay amongst all the stalls. Next is feed; I fill a bucket with a mix of the round, rich, brown pellets of Senior and the longer tan pellets of Trotter, then deliver scoops to all the stalls, two for some and one for others.
Done with my work, I walk up towards the house. I can see a couple of stars. A few years ago, when the land-clearing had started but the houses had not yet come in, you could see them the way you can see stars in the country. One of the many summer nights I stayed over, I slept outside, my sleeping bag on the pavement, still warm from the sun, and watched a meteor shower in silence. I am sure there were crickets, but the dogs were silent, the horses were asleep, and the area was not yet populated enough for the road to really be in use past eleven. All I can remember is the warm pavement, the exhaustion from another hot, humid, day of work, and the sky, watching the occasional meteor. I saw a handful that night, probably more than I had ever seen at once. Now, I could see two stars distinctly. I know more will be out, but the sky does not blanket itself anymore, now that there are lights always on in some or other of the many identical houses.
One of the most eloquent testimonies to places’ extraordinary memorability is found in nostalgia…Post haste in short! (Casey 201).
This return “home,” from which I began my exploration, was brief and came after many months away (the prior visits had, too, been brief, for I no longer remain in the area long enough to devote myself to any of its many life-central places). Yet—or perhaps because of this—it was powerful, extraordinarily healing of the many wounds and anxieties of the outside world. As Casey says, the powerful phenomenon of nostalgia “has everything to do with the memory of place” (201), and connects to a place’s ability to contain the so-called “past” in a way abstract memory, or as Pierre Nora discusses, general history, cannot. The act of returning, and the act of once again interacting bodily with the place (grooming, riding) carried with it all the memories contained by the place, and the experience solidified itself in the ever-growing history, or memory, of Clarksburg.
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