Pining for Place

I am swiftly approaching my all-time record for most books read in one year and as I perused the titles the other day I noticed a recurring theme: about one-third of the books I have read to date are about home, place, travel, or some other related topic, hence the title of today’s post. And it is not only this year’s theme but a continuing one ever since Linda and I sold our house to live and move more freely and lightly. It also represents at least one-tenth of my overall blog posts.

So, what to glean from all this? I think “pining for place” is more about seeking a sustainable sense of community than it is about the option of home ownership. Neither Linda or I regret selling our home nor do we ever intend to own another one. But if there is one attribute of our mobile lifestyle that has left us in limbo it is the lack of any one location feeling like a long-term place to call home rather than a pitstop on our journey.

Now that I have returned to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where I was born and raised this very well may be the end of the road for me, as Linda also appears agreeable. I very much enjoy sharing my beautiful home state with her and Lexington has exceeded our expectations thus far so we shall see what the future holds. One of the place-based books I’ve read recently captures the essence of what I am describing here.

As author Susan Wittig Albert writes in Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place, “At first, I dismissed this as mere sentiment, a belated homesickness, a midlife nostalgia. But what is sentiment but an impulse of the heart…And what is homesickness but a desire to be at home, to be in place, to dwell in the here from whence we came?”

“The average American moves twelve times in his or her lifetime, and a house is more often considered an investment rather than a home place,” continues Albert. “And while real estate agents chant the mantra ‘location, location, location,’ what they’re extolling is the site’s relative proximity to some other, more desirable feature: shops, offices, recreation, university.”

I hadn’t thought homesickness was my malady but I think living here may be the remedy I didn’t know I needed. We are slightly above average with our thirteenth move thus far and all of the above features are walkable for us so that is a good sign. And wherever you are on your journey through life I hope you find your own place of peace.

Home Sweet Home

One of the very first questions Linda and I get from local folks upon learning of our move here is, “Why Lexington?” Not that people who live here are not fond of it, quite the contrary. I think it is more a matter of people wondering what appealed to us about moving here. At any rate, the usual suspects of history and architecture are prevalent here, as is a vibrant downtown with its thriving main street mixture of retail and residential (as pictured above from our corner window).

And the presence of not one but two prestigious universities nestled here in a quaint town centrally located in the scenic Shenandoah Valley, where I originally hail from, helped to seal the deal for us. So it was with special interest that I learned the other day that according to the 2020 U.S. Census, with a median age of a mere 22 years old, Lexington is the YOUNGEST locale in all of America.

More than half of Lexington’s 8,000 citizens are students and more than half our circa 1890 apartment building’s residents are Washington & Lee (W&L) law school students. While we’ve yet to locate the proverbial fountain of youth here, living in the midst of so many bright young people helps to keep us young at heart. As I write this I am happily ensconced in the W&L library, which I have practically all to myself since the students are gone for holiday break.

Maya Angelou is quoted as saying, “You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home so it’s all right.” As Virginia was the one state I had lived but Linda had not, I wanted to share my home state with her and we are thoroughly enjoying our exploration of it on the weekends. So to close with another insightful quote, it was T.S. Eliot who wrote, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The Memory of Home

When Linda and I relocated here to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia from the coast of Maine I thought moving from our maritime location might mean leaving my creative muse behind but that has proved not to be true. Here we are surrounded by beauty; it is simply of a different type. We are close to the world famous Blue Ridge Parkway, not to mention the Appalachian Trail, Skyline Drive, Luray Caverns, Natural Bridge, and other natural wonders.   

And I was pleasantly surprised to come upon this quote in the official guidebook of Virginia by K.M. Kostyal: “Of all Virginia’s towns, this in the end, may be the loveliest. About 30 miles south of Staunton off I-81, small, intimate Lexington stretches along a classic Main Street filled with cafes, haberdasheries, and bookstores typical of a university town. Houses and public buildings from the early and mid-19th century line downtown and residential streets,” one of which we inhabit.  

Regular readers will recognize that one of the themes I write about here is the import of place in our lives and how the practice of photography helps us maintain memories of our experience in the places we inhabit. As I attended the monthly meeting of the local camera club the other day, I was reminded of the part photography has played in chronicling our journey from place to place. And you can check out some recent highlights here.

Being the collector of quotes that I am, I came across a couple that capture my thoughts concisely: “We’re Americans, our lives transient and easily uprooted. Yet the ideal that we Americans cherish is some cozy picture-book town—like the Lexington of our childhoods, or some idealized New England village—where everyone knows his neighbors,” writes local author Lisa Tracy in Objects of Our Affection.

And writer Allison Glock states in Southern Living, “I came to realize that the South was the love of my life—the dark, complicated, delicious, messy, blindingly gorgeous love I could not stop pining after, no matter how far I traveled or how much I claimed I’d be better off without it…Sometimes you have to leave in order to find your way home.” So, wherever you call home I hope you make meaningful memories of your very own!

Dare to Dream

As regular readers likely realize, I love to write about dreaming because it has become the oxygen that I breathe. Without dreams we are destined for “lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau observed. But buoyed by our dreams, we experience breakthroughs that were once thought impossible. Upon perusing former blog posts I was reminded that I also have written about dreams since moving here a couple years ago here and here so help yourself to them.    

And for this post I’d like to share more excerpts from my latest reading to help inspire you to chase your dreams also. It was French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, who reported, “If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” How poetic.  

As for Linda and I, living at this circa 1895 lightkeeper’s house is literally the fulfillment of a dream for us, even if it comes with its share of tourists during the year. And Bob Trapani, head of the nearby American Lighthouse Foundation, notes that while Maine’s lighthouses attract people from all over the world, “They are places of solitude. The quiet is amazing. They are places where you make life-changing decisions.” And I add, dream. 

Author Erica Bauermeister writes in House Lessons: Renovating a Life: “It wasn’t until I discovered geographer Jay Appleton’s theory of prospect and refuge that I found a framework to explain my reaction [to home]. According to Appleton, humans are most comfortable in situations where they can observe (prospect) and feel safe (refuge) at the same time.” Our privy perch affords us the same perspective.  

For further reflections on the dynamics of dreaming, I welcome you to check out the video we filmed this weekend from our deck overlooking the lighthouse here. Linda and I feel very blessed to live where we do and we owe it all to God, who “works everything together for our good,” to paraphrase a favorite scripture. And suffice it to say that he delights in giving his people the good desires of their hearts.  

Finally, Rachel Carson wrote in The Edge of the Sea, “Like the sea itself, the shore fascinates us who return to it…In the recurrent rhythms of tides and surf and in the varied life of the tide lines there is the obvious attraction of movement and change and beauty. There is also, I am convinced, a deeper fascination born of meaning and significance.” But wherever you call home, dare to dream and discover your destiny!

The Village Life

With a health crisis enveloping much of the outside world, it is during such times that I am glad I live in a remote fishing village of a couple hundred or so souls. Port Clyde, America, as it is euphemistically referred to, is located at the very tip of the Saint George peninsula jutting into the Gulf of Maine. As a matter of course, we live far away from major airports, shopping malls, sports stadiums, and other large venues with crowds of people, thus minimizing our exposure. And Linda has since learned she can work remotely from home for the next couple of weeks. 

Even before the “stuff hit the fan” this week, Linda and I were discussing how much we love the village vibe here. As a case in point, the other morning I called our local diner (located in the general store) to see if our favorite cook, Melissa, was back from her honeymoon so we could come for breakfast. Next, I called our postmistress (or female postmaster), Brie, at our post office to see about renewing our mailbox. And finally, I called the town office and spoke to the clerk, Patty, (whom I reminded we live at the lighthouse) to inquire about an upcoming event. 

To further reinforce my point, after visiting our nearest Walmart, located off of the peninsula, and discovering that the hordes had cleared the store of all paper products, we returned to our beloved general store to stock up on the requisite toilet paper supply, which was plentiful. As none other than Mark Twain once observed, “If you want to know a man truly, get to know him in a village, not a city.” And for another of my ruminations about village life, I welcome readers to check out one of my earlier posts about the simpler lifestyle it engenders here.

In closure, I share some thoughts of a fellow Maine resident, renowned author Doris Grumbach, from her book Life in a Day: “I have become a minimalist of experience. Once I thought I could never travel to all the places I wanted to see, but in old age, the cove, in the variety of its seasons and weathers and times, seems to satisfy my need for new sights.” 

And she quotes Somerset Maugham here: “Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.” 

The Place of Home

So, in anticipation of our upcoming move to the Marshall Point light keeper’s house I have been meditating on the place of home. And specifically, how our concept of home is reflected in the places we live and the people we love. To that point, Linda and I have both commented lately how we sense a definite grace for this place.

For the uninitiated, Maine is not necessarily a picnic of a place to call home, particularly in the dead of winter, which is thankfully fading for us. Yet even though we are both Southerners by birth, we have adopted this northernmost New England state as our own. And much of it has to do with the natural beauty reflected in its rugged coastline and reclusive coves, like the one to which we are moving.

As Steve Thomas, the former host of This Old House and current Port Clyde (home of Marshall Point) resident, has said, “Maine still has a sense of place that is long gone from the rest of the United States. There’s a sense of community, that we’re all in this together…Mainers don’t care what kind of car you drive, what you do for a living, or how much money you make…That kind of egalitarianism is pretty unusual.” 

And renowned photographer and Rockport (where we currently live) resident Peter Ralston writes in his book Sightings: A Maine Coast Odyssey:“In the communities out there I had found a haven where I was inexplicably but utterly at home. I had found my querencia, the place that triggers an instinctive sense of belonging…Here, along Maine’s coast, I recovered my reverence for the silence of absence and the life and soul of ‘place.’”

Longtime readers will recall that the journey to our own home place here began with our willingness to radically limit our large library of more than a thousand books so as to live and travel more freely and lightly. So, I loved coming across this insightful quote by Cyril Connolly the other day: “A book collector is like a lighthouse keeper who offers sanctuary to buffeted and exhausted migrants as they home towards the friendly beam.” Suffice it to say that the trade-off of our beloved library for a lighthouse abode has been more than worth it.

A Strong Sense of Place

Several years ago, upon hearing me rave about our former hometown, a fellow editor observed that I had “a strong sense of place.” Another colleague at the same publisher jokingly suggested that I may have missed my calling by not working at the Chamber of Commerce there. I had never thought about it before but it “hit home” with me, as I have always made it a point to live in places that feed my soul.

I can’t vouch for others, as I realize there can be issues that limit people from living where they like, but Linda and I willingly made whatever changes necessary to experience it for ourselves and it has been an amazing journey. Our perspective is that life is too short to live in ordinary places. And no less than Abraham Lincoln echoed this sentiment by stating, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives.”

As for us, it was the siren call of the sea that ultimately proved irresistible, and decamping here to the coast of Maine a couple years ago has been the best move we ever made. This is the first place we have lived without an alternate destination in mind so we feel like we may have finally found our home. There is simply something special about this place “where the mountains meet the sea.”

It was Maine native Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who wrote, “My soul is full of longings for the secrets of the sea and the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me.” And another Mainer, Rachel Carson, added, “Like the sea itself, the shore fascinates us who return to it….In the recurrent rhythms of tides and surf…there is the obvious attraction of movement and change and beauty.”

As I have meditated on the power of place in our lives I have collected a couple of other quotes that speak to it also. Author Cynthia Huntington noted in The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod, “It seems to me that the greatest adventure is to find a home in the world, particularly in the natural world, to earn a sense of belonging deeply to a place and to feel the deep response well up within you and become a part of you.”

And biographer Laura Dassow Walls writes in Henry David Thoreau: A Life, “No American writer is more place centered than Thoreau. Take him away from…Concord…and Thoreau is a different person. He learned this himself when he moved to New York City and tried to be like other writers, mobile and market driven. It was a disaster.”

I once nearly made the same move as Thoreau but rather than heading to New York City I landed on Cape Cod and it changed my life forever. Instead of the sounds of sirens and other noisy signs of the big city, I spent the best summer of my life at the beach, listening to the rhythmic ebb and flow of the tidal surf. And from attending to the quiet whisperings of my own heart there, that one detour led me to the place I call home today. 

The Place Called Home

I have been thinking a lot about the place called home lately. And as a sign I saw at Cracker Barrel the other day eloquently states: “What I Love Most About My Home Is Who I Share It With.” As I have written here before, home to me is wherever my wife, Linda, and I are together. And for the time being, that is an antebellum house we are leasing here in Middle Tennessee. Yet travel writer Pico Iyer has written, “Home is the place where you become yourself…Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.” And lately I have been thinking of the sea.

For all of Middle Tennessee’s charms, and they are many, one thing it cannot supply is the beach vibe we love and were blessed to experience during our sabbatical on the island of Nantucket a couple of years ago. As blessed as we are here, I cannot help but reflect fondly upon our time spent enveloped by the sea. Even when we lived for several years in Central Florida before heading to Nantucket we furnished our Cape Cod style cottage with nautical prints of lighthouses and ships. And some of my favorite books include such titles as Gift From the Sea, Return to the Sea, and A Year by the Sea. I guess one could quip that the ocean “floats my boat.”

And so it was with much interest that I read this passage from a thought provoking book titled On Moving: A Writer’s Meditations on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again by Louise DeSalvo: “[The poet] Elizabeth Bishop loved to live in ‘temporary homes by the sea.’ They brought back the ease she’d sometimes felt in Nova Scotia. She liked the simplification, improvisation, and community these places could provide. ‘You live in this Robinson Crusoe atmosphere,’ she wrote, ‘…contriving and inventing.’ It is just such qualities that I find myself craving anew. So we shall see where all this carries us. But in the meantime, I am making myself at home for the holidays and hope you enjoy yours also.

No Place Like Home

As I shared earlier, my wife Linda and I have done a little traveling this summer and it has been fun. During Memorial Day weekend we visited Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky and to celebrate Independence Day (and our wedding anniversary) we visited Sewanee in Monteagle, Tennessee. And at each place, we were treated to classical music concerts, which we loved.

Yet as nice as each place was to visit, we nonetheless found ourselves uttering that familiar phrase, “be it ever so humble, there is no place like home,” which has gotten me to think about the meaning of home again, particularly since our one-year lease has expired and we are living on a month-to-month basis. The virtues of our present place are many and so we are content to continue living here.

For friends and family who have followed our journey these last three years since we sold our house and furniture to explore a more location-independent lifestyle, the question may arise, “so do thoughts of home mean you are thinking of settling down again?” To which we’d reply, “uh, no.” I’m not sure I even know what settling down would look like for us, but it definitely does not include buying another house. It even feels a little funny staying in the same area for the last couple years, even though we changed addresses.

As regular readers may recall, I posted an entry titled The Meaning of Home about a year ago but here are more thoughts about it. Alain de Botton writes in The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life, “Those places whose outlook matches and legitimates our own, we tend to honor with the term ‘home.’ Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognize its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a diner.”

And Kirsten Chapman adds in The Way Home, “We are imprinted with an eternal sense of ‘home’—no matter how far we wander. Home can be found in a place, a person, a book, a melody. When we feel it, we know we’re there. It is that safe haven where we find comfort. Where we feel anchored. It is a lifeline.” So for the time being, we are at home here, and if that changes, I will write about it.

The Meaning of Home

With the holidays around the corner it is natural that our thoughts turn to hearth and home. But exactly what is the meaning of home? Many of us think of some idealized version of a house, perhaps situated down a lane or upon a hill, surrounded by a bucolic landscape, maybe in New England or some other picturesque setting.

However, as the saying goes, “a house does not make a home.” What most of us mean when we conjure visions of home is the sense of togetherness we experience with the people we love. It is our relationships with loved ones that constitute a home, not real estate, no matter how beautifully situated.

So to quote another popular saying, “home is where the heart is.” If there is anything that Linda and I have learned over the course of the last couple years is that “home” has become a moving target for us. Home is wherever we are with each other. And as Christians, we’ve adopted the truism that “In Christ” is our permanent address.

In her groundbreaking book The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters, Sarah Susanka writes, “Although we normally associate the word “home” with a place that’s built out of bricks and mortar, in fact home is much more than that. It is a feeling and a way of being in one’s life rather than any specific place.”

“We are all looking for home, but we’re looking with the wrong tool,” adds Susanka. “We are trying to find home through more square footage, when in fact the quality of home has almost nothing to do with size. Instead, it’s to be found in the qualities of space rather than the quantities…” This holiday season, here’s to sweet fellowship, regardless of the square footage.

The Touchstones of Our Lives

I was reading a southern lifestyle magazine at the bookstore today and came across a thought-provoking article titled “Stuff, Sweet Stuff” by Julia Reed. And she shared a term I had all but forgotten: touchstone. According to the dictionary, a touchstone is “something that is used to make judgments about the quality of other things.” In other words, it is a sort of measuring stick by which you value your stuff relative to other stuff.

For example, when my wife and I radically downscaled our stuff in order to live more lightly, we very intentionally waded through our things, weighing whether or not each item deserved a valued place in our final collection of treasures. Things like my college diploma and picture of my grandmother made the cut while my golf clubs and tennis rackets did not. I quit playing both sports but the other items were touchstones in my life, mementos that I valued enough to keep toting on my journey.

As Reed writes: “For me, home is where you find the touchstones of your life…But I’m actually a bit of a vagabond—I just need to know I can take my nest with me when I go. And that’s the thing about touchstones: Unlike a house, you can take them with you. After all, generations of Southerners have made a semi-profession out of toting around and lavishly tending to family heirlooms and prized possessions—though that’s not exactly what I have in mind.”

Of Hearth and Home

As yet another year draws to a close I am reflecting on what a huge year of transition it has been for my wife and me. At this time last year we were enjoying a welcome sabbatical on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts for the winter before an ill-fated attempt to relocate to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area, where we were nonetheless able to sell a couple of vehicles of ours that had outlived their usefulness.

And as regular readers know, come spring we headed to Florida to gather some of our belongings from family before returning halfway here to the Nashville suburb of Franklin, Tennessee, which we love. Since moving here we have renewed our appreciation of hearth and home, as we moved every six months or so before signing a year’s lease of an apartment in an historic building in downtown Franklin, which includes a fireplace, albeit a closed one.

To help compensate for the lack of a working fireplace I downloaded an application [complete with crackling sounds] for use on our computer and we visit our local Cracker Barrel on cold days to soak up the ambience of their fireplace. It has been fun placing our stockings and Christmas cards on the mantel during the holidays and otherwise celebrating this most festive time of year. We are thankful to be closer to family and friends nowadays and welcome the return to our southern roots, not the least of which involves good old fashioned homestyle cooking, even if not over a fire.

The Psychology of Place

Writer Russell Banks observed about the psychology of place: “All travel writing that’s of lasting interest—writing that is written by writers as travelers, not travelers as writers—is really written to make a point about home…which leads one to conclude that the best travel writers are people who are at bottom unsure of the nature and limits of home and their relation to it. They move out of the house...so that…they can look back and see what’s true there.”

As reflective sojourners, my wife and I are still in the process of looking back and seeing “what’s true there” after selling our house last year and redefining what home means for us in this new phase of our lives. And we both agree that while there are facets of home ownership that we miss, we are convinced that we made the right move and are very much enjoying the fruits of it.

What enriches our experience exponentially is the realization that we are walking out the will of God for our lives, of which we are continually reminded in ways both big and small. For example, upon relocating here to Franklin, we landed the first place we looked at living, we leased the first car we test drove, and Linda got the first job she inquired about, all within about a month of moving to unknown territory during a poor economy.

Washashores

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the first thing you see as you enter Nantucket Harbor is the Brant Point lighthouse, which dates to 1746 and is the second oldest lighthouse in America. One of the neat things about living here during the winter is seeing it nautically decorated for Christmas with the Coast Guard’s crossing of oars in the center of a festooned wreath, reminding one and all of this faraway isle’s maritime heritage.

As we soon learned upon our arrival here nearly two months ago, “washashores” is the official term used to describe folks like us who move here from “America,” as off-island is referred to by locals. And while we may be washashores we have enjoyed a very warm welcome. Indeed, one of the pleasant surprises about life here is how friendly the people generally are, an attribute I think results from braving winters together on a secluded island.

In Walden, Thoreau observed, “At length the winter set in good earnest ... and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then . . . I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast.” While we don’t have a fireplace here like we did in Florida [go figure] today is the warmest first day of winter on record here, at a balmy 55 degrees!

In closing, I leave you with the observation of Moby Dick author Herman Melville: “Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than a lighthouse. Look at it: a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” And home to washashores.