Being in the right place at the right time
Originally published in Ellemeno at Medium.com on October 31, 2023
I found by accident the place I now live in. A neighbor of mine in the neighborhood I left to move here heard about a place for sale that had all the rusticness and isolation she craved. I got invited to go along and scope it out with her.
What happened was that I fell in love, as did she. We were both chasing the same Eden and this place was it. Fifteen acres backing on a meadow that stretched to the Blue Ridge, a mile to the east. Not another house in sight, although they were close by, but shielded by almost strategically placed copses. Maybe deliberately planted.
Both my neighbor and I, in the places we lived then, were being crowded out by housing developments popping up in three directions around us. This was not an unusual occurrence in my county and it’s not abated in the 20 years that have elapsed. What was a trickle then is now a gusher of new housing, mostly densely packed town houses.
With both of us interested in the house, the decision for each of us came down to affordability. We were both home owners already, but my home was more or less fixed up and livable; hers not so much. She wouldn’t be able to draw on as much equity as I would. And so it turned out that she couldn’t afford the house, but I could. The have, in this rare case me, won out over the have-not her, but with her typical grace, she ceded her right of refusal to me.
I bought the property and now have lived on it for longer than I have anywhere else in my life. And it will be the last property I will live in.
What’s made my decision permanent is not so much the house itself, which over the years I’ve added a personal stamp to. It wasn’t a fabulous house when I bought it, but I didn’t buy it for the house. The setting clinched the deal.
Because the land was the real draw, I didn’t worry about a house inspection as a contingency on the contract. If it had been the house, I would have regretted getting involved with a place with a rusted metal roof, buckling tile floors, a senile well pump, windows permanently fogged with ruptured seals, a rutted out gravel driveway, and an overgrown pond. There were years of work ahead to correct it all, not to mention that the place was way too small, requiring an addition.
Twenty some years turned out to be a long enough time so that all the initial problems got taken care of. Now in addition to the views that still amaze me every day, I have a house that generally behaves and pleases me. Though even dream houses come with the usual homeowner grief that causes some restless, little-sleep nights. But whatever. We cope. It’s good.
That good relates to what is the real point of this telling. It’s the place and the fusion it makes (or doesn’t make) with the lives of the people inhabiting it that makes the difference. There has to be a match-up between the personality of the residents and the character of the property.
I think I was lucky at the outset to know this was where I wanted to be. The land was isolated and isolation is what I needed. I’ve traveled a lot around the country and the world and during those travels the only places that have super charged me were places that were calm and isolated. My career made abiding in any of them out of the question. City life paid the bills.
The pulls on my life, work versus the environment, meant I had to keep one foot economically planted in the city. For half my time here, that city was Washington, about a 65 mile commute by train, broken up for a long stretch with a house I shared with my then partner in the urban sprawl of metro D.C.
On his death, faced with the prospect of maintaining two houses, I made the easy decision to live in the place that I felt had adopted me. And here I still sit, observing and existing and now and then reading and writing.
Speaking of reading, I recently read an essay called ‘The Invitation’ by Barry Lopez in his collection ‘Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World’. Lopez through most of his life felt a connection with places, maybe especially the Arctic, that were isolated, and where their objects and life forms also lent them their character. Just as important, he implies, these were places where the critters and the people both appreciated where they were because that’s where they fit.
In his essay, Lopez highlights the lessons he learned through his Indigenous teachers in these isolated areas — lessons focused on seeing and hearing things, living and not living, in the context of how they came to be where they were heard and sighted. It was through these close observations how he learned the full narratives of these objects and beings. He says, as an example, that for his guides the reality of a bear was languaged as a verb, a gerund, “bearing,” not as the independent noun “bear.”
This idea of seeing entities as verbs is part of the grammar of many languages, but is bound so tightly into the grammatical reality of certain languages that linguists have questioned whether these languages possess nouns at all. The Salishan languages of the Pacific Northwest have been described that way. These languages non-coincidentally also include a system of evidential markers, meaning their utterances must obligatorily express the source of the evidence the speaker has for the information conveyed.
The implication of verbing objects and stating how you know what you’re talking about strongly implies that you have been paying attention to the goings on around you. And maybe that’s what you have to do when you’ve been placed in an isolated environment where self-sufficiency is a survival tactic for you and your community.
Lopez states the lesson of this essay as nature offering up in every sighting and hearing an invitation to participate, not to run away. To paraphrase him: a bear shitting in the woods is more than just a bear shitting in the woods. It’s an event that’s part of a larger narrative. “It is a point of entry into a world most of us have turned our backs on in an effort to go somewhere else.” Lopez recommends stopping, learning what came before and what comes next.
I’m still new at this, but I’m in the right place for me to practice.