Two Dot: blood, bones, territory

Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies…immerse me in the old sun and space, return me to the big geometry of the prairie and the tension of that prairie wind…they lie in me like underground water; every well I put down taps them.  Wallace Stegner in Marking the Sparrow's Fall

Is this place where the Great Plains butt up to the Rockies my underground water? Was I marked by this landscape as a young child? Is that why I am here now?   I came here rarely and briefly as a kid, but the “shape and geometry” of this place seems to be in my blood. 

What happens when your childhood territory has been lost to development, or appropriation, or decline, or any change? Wallace Stegner’s Cypress Hills, the place he claimed to have shaped his perception, are now a provincial Park with “recreation opportunities.” When the particulars of a place that has marked us change, the impulse is to not return. We want to hold the memory. But I don’t think Stegner was talking about preservation. Being marked by place is not so much about memory, as it is about recognition. 

Like the sensuous images persistent from childhood, like the ineradicable attitudes and prejudices, the history of one’s truly native place may be comprehended in the bone and the blood, and one may build a life forward from it as surely as if his past had been learned under savants and memorialized in monuments. Wallace Stegner

I do comprehend this place through blood and bones, but am also driven to history to bring understanding to what I know.

Two Dot: words or no words

Terry Tempest Williams When Women Were Birds is an effort to understand a code her mother left behind. In 54 variations and 208 pages she deciphers and does not decipher her mother’s journals… journals that were blank. I have finished the book just as I begin a summer with my own mother’s diaries and photographs and dresses and spoons. It is all a code, whether there are words or no words, whether I am looking at my mother or the myth of my mother, either way. 

I have my mother’s last journal here with me in Two Dot. It contains mostly blank pages. Diane Dixon Tempest left her journals to her daughter Terry Tempest Williams; they were all blank. It is not exactly the same. My mother’s empty pages mark her ending after making note of each day on nearly every day of her life since she was able to hold a pencil and form letters. I have wondered if I might dare to write on those pages… to continue her story. 

My mother’s photo sits on my writing desk in Two Dot. It is a photo of her as a young girl, unknowing of what is to come but fresh and ready. It was surely a vital time for her, though she may have seen it as a time of waiting. She was the youngest of six, most of the others already off on their own.

My mother’s journals are a white blouse, not yet worn. Terry Tempest Williams

The blouse not yet worn is clearly evident in my mother’s photo… everything was to come. But isn’t there always something more for each of us, something not yet known, even for me at sixty-two. When my mother was sixty-two, she had not yet entered her best marriage… it was still an unworn white blouse ready to slip into. 

Two Dot: there becomes here

We are there and it has become here. This morning, sitting in my bed, I looked out the middle window toward the east. It was divided, half green and half soft blue nearly white. Now I am back in bed and it is getting dark. The same window is still divided, but now half grayed yellow and half deepening blue. It reminds me of the little paintings I made in high school on scraps of wood… half yellow and half blue. Were they a foreshadow of this place and my love for it?

...expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time…. he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. Wallace Stegner

With sunrise, the color of everything is changing. But, I have very few words, or no new words for this place and season, for the three squares of light that trace across the wall when the sun comes up. Just now, the middle square is illuminating a photo of my grandmother Sadie and her sister Vina when they were girls. I will find my way back into their story while I am here. But, just now I am re-acquainting myself with each thing I’ve known before: the wind, the light, the sky, the bird songs and the way a day unrolls. 

Exactly one year ago, the day was stormy and culminated in fifteen minutes of hail and havoc. The schoolhouse has been mostly repaired, the car left pocked to tell the tale, and today I can see where the plants have recovered and where they have not. This June first is entirely different, bucolic with bird sightings. But I know enough not to be fooled. It could change in a minute. 

I spotted new birds in the yard today. Four of them flit around with one or the other momentarily perching on the flagpole. I have consulted 2 books and think they are possibly tree swallows. I have become, not so much a bird watcher as watcher in general. Last week in Seattle, I met with a writing teacher to review my essay on transition. She was asking for more detail as to what I do when I am here. She thought my writing suggested that I just sit outside and look. And just now, my pen not moving for more than 5 minutes while I watch a horse eating grass, I think she might be right. 

My plan was to read while eating breakfast outside, but I left the magazine fluttering on the sidewalk beside my chair and just felt the wind. I won’t say the wind was howling, its voice being much more sophisticated and complex. It was more of an orchestration, leaf rattling against leaf, chains ringing against a pole, and something inexplicable that may just be air moving quickly around a corner. I have made peace… even friends with the wind. Years ago, visiting Ellensburg, another place of wind, I vowed I could never live in such a place. I was unnerved by the constancy of moving air. But my view has changed and I live here now with the wind as companion; its force refreshing me, sometimes scaring me, but welcome all the same. 

Seattle: peripheral glimpse

I was up in the night, driven from my bed by a need for water. I went all the way upstairs to the kitchen in search of a tall glass for drinking and a cool cloth. It seemed that if I laid the cloth over my forehead it would help to quench my thirst. Through the kitchen window I noticed a star in the sky and when I looked closer I saw another. Standing very still and squinting my eyes just enough, I found I could see more. It takes a reasoned faith to believe we sleep under nearly the same sky in Seattle and in Two Dot where the stars are so bright they penetrate our eyelids. But here in the city, with empty water glass in hand and before the cool cloth touched my forehead I’d seen them, ten bright stars shinning through a haze of urban lights. I counted those ten stars twice before going back downstairs to bed where I held their memory in place with the coolness of a cloth to the eyes.