Place Entry # 2: We Lie in Our Graves

Today in the cemetery it is snowing flakes like clumpy, wet, chewed marshmallows. They feel heavy as they land in thuds on my shoulders. I can literally feel them individually fall on my posture. The ground is unseasonably warm today, and this is proven by the splatting and the instant liquid transformation the snow makes when in contacts the earth’s surface

Being in the Homewood Cemetery, looking across the stone “markings of placement”, it is hard not to think of the grave. And as the flakes dissolve into the ground I cannot help but think of the earth as the ultimate grave.

As I morbidly pounder the grave of the earth, and walk down the macadam streams of the cemetery I come pass a tree branch that has fallen. The branch lies in between two headstones, lying vertical. I imagine the branch is in consistency with the bodies underneath the slushy dirt.  The tree has small limbs at its sides like legs and arms, and even smaller twigs like fingers and toes grabbed by rigor mortis. The skinned color of the deceased branch has changed from the original flush of its tree community, and is now pale, dipped in the blandness of separation. I am stunned by the so many “human like” expressions of this tree’s burial.

As I said, the branch lies between two headstones. The stone on the left is marked with the name, Layng. I think for a second that it reads Laying (which reminds me of lying) and I look again to make sure. It is Layng, but what a beautiful closeness on three levels.

They are all lying here: the body, the branch, the plant, the stone, the animal, the living, and the dead. I am here too, in my grave.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time in the cemetery.

Blog Prompt #2- Sharing is Caring

This week in our class discussion thread we have all been working to define and establish what our personal home is or can be. I have been mulling this concept (home) over and over in my head for a few weeks now, and for some of us in the class home does not necessarily correlate with a certain landscape. I want to believe that it doesn’t, but for now it is all I can seem grab on to.

In thinking of personal experience in association with place and home I am left thinking about shared familiarity. I find that the places that I have felt at home, and these places always carry shared experiences with another person.

Looking back at my connection with nature and the feeling of home from my youth, it was more than just the farm, and barn, and the white house with the porch like a moat. It was more than the , and the lilac bushes, and the apple trees that made me feel at home. The home that the farm was to me, was found in the sharing of place with my family. My establishment of home was shaped by a collaborative learning of who and where I was.

The farm felt like home because that’s where I learned from not only the people in my family but the land. It was where my mother bought my brother and I children sized hoes. Where we helped to till the ground, preparing the topsoil for seeding, and where we weekly complained and labored to pull weeds. Where we experienced the overwhelming amounts of dirt that quickly accumulates under your fingernails when dig with your hands. It was where our father showed us the perfect attributes and the advantages to spotting the perfect walking stick when we decided to climb to the top the property, our world. He always said that we would want to find something that came up to our chests, “It’s a leverage thing. Grab something light but strong.” The farm was where my brother and I discovered the irritable itch that comes from poison ivy and its three terroristic leaves that lined the tree line, and where bit into sour apples the size of golf balls (a lesson in patience).

The farm was home because I never did anything alone. Every moment outside was shared, every experience was teamed. And now, living for the first time, away from my family I have to create new experiences, I am learning how to find new ways to share them, and to build a home on relationships with a landscape and community that I didn’t grow up with.

Is it possible to change your established notion of home? Is it possible to truly change your perception of what it is? Can I make a new one, or will my home wear like a scar? Will I ever connect with any place the way I connected with the farm? I don’t know. Maybe when (if) I have kids.

Place Entry #1: Today in the Cemetery: Day 1

     It is Wednesday the 19^th of January. I am walking in Pittsburgh’s Homewood Cemetery for the first time. When trying to experience a “place” for the first time it is natural to be overly aware of  your senses, and I am.

               

    My mind focuses on the feeling of my feet landing with every step on the cold pavement of road. The discomfort and growing cold that clings to my toes as I clinch them into small fists in-between strides, wanting to feel the blood actually travel from the throb of my heart down to the literal tips of my toes. This turns into a game of speed and coordination that I play with myself.

                

    Continuing to walk, I think that I hear birds singing, but that’s silly, they’ve all flown south right? I stop and listen. The sounds stop. I step again, and the sounds rise. I stop and they (the sounds), again stop. I think of the blues, and the technique of “call and response”. People often allude to the music or orchestration of the natural world. I smile and keep walking, thinking of my stroll as an improvisational riff that nature and I are in. Thinking of scatting, and Louis Armstrong, the smooth, gravel, slide, and “coolness” of his musical quality.

               

  In the cemetery there is not too much to taste, I think. But I stop my walking and bite at the air, inhaling with my mouth wide open. I do taste the cemetery. There is a gamy quality to this place. This is understandable since the term “game” in an animal sense simply means- an animal not normally domesticated. The cemetery may be the least domesticated place for animals to be. What human provision or control really is there in a cemetery? Everyone here for any majority of the time is dead. So I will describe the cemetery’s taste as… gamy.

                

    What I see are sloping hills (sot surprising for an area where the word “hill” is its name). The inclines look spotted. The gravestones and occasional oblong-esque patches of brown roots and dead grass blot the snow. The snow is trying so desperately to cover the ground and reminds me of a Dalmatian, but dogs are not allowed in the Homewood Cemetery.

                 

   Now I am left to my nose. What do I smell: in movies, when a character is in a place of “death”, or around dead bodies they can identify “the smell” of death? I do not smell “death” in a literal sense of decaying bodies (however the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “That Smell” is stuck in my head), or do I? When initially asking myself this, I automatically thought about a “human” death. What about the world around me? I breathe in not considering the tombstones and the human shells under the soil. I do smell death, the somewhat smoky and damp smell that permeates through the mixing of dirt, fallen leaves, and slowly melting snow. I hold a piece of the tar like substance to my nose and swallow the smell of the compost. I think of sawdust, imagine I am in a woodshop, and wonder what we are carving?

               

   I sense that I am going to grow to really enjoy this place. Thanks for reading and I will see you tomorrow, in the cemetery.

Blog Prompt #1- Farm Home

              The time and place that one enters the world, and is then nurtured through childhood/adolescence has always affected human beings. It is something as fundamental to the construction of who you (the person) are as the DNA that made and crafted your bodies physical features.

               

               I think of the landscape of my birth and the culture of that place. I grew up in a family of 4, on a 180 acre of cattle farm in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania. Honesty compels me to tell you that my family literally had no part in maintaining or working the land. We simply paid rent and enjoyed the ground. Anyway, I remember it as being a landscape of cliché, something  you would see cross-stitched into stretched fabric with autumn colors. I affectionately call this home/landscape the Farm (I know, it sounds like something out of a Stephen King story. Don’t judge).

                 

               We rented half of a two-story house; the white paint was wearing on the sides, a winding porch that wrapped the walls like a belt, and a “smallish” red barn cattycornered to the front door (a place filled with mystery and tractors, a place the children were not allowed). There were apple trees in the backyard, lilac bushes lining the driveway, hay bales towards the top of the ridge, a manmade pond where we never swam, and lots of cows (maybe hundreds, innumerable like the stars to a child’s eye) lassoed in my an electric fence.  

                Aside from the basic aesthetics of the farm landscape, something that is typical when living on a large piece of land (not populated by many) is a culture of isolation. The farm had a beautiful aspect of separation to me; it existed outside the “normal world”. It was ours in so many ways, and there was nothing to fear.

                I don’t know if I ever felt as much a part of a community as I did growing up on the farm. The idea of “cooperative living” keeps jotting up in my head. I remember living a very cooperative life, not only in a human to human basis, but more of a developed cooperation with nature. Like I mentioned before, my family rented our house and did not own any of the property. I remember my parents instilling in my brother and I this idea: that the ability to explore, play, and run around on the farm was a privilege and should be treated as such. I am not sure if it was the fact that we didn’t own the land (and the fear that their two boys could, a whole host of ways, ignite an insurance nightmare) that prompted my parents to relay the importance of respect towards the landscape or not. However and for whatever reason, the lesson stuck with me and to this day it is both reflected in and affecting how I interact with people and place.

                 

                Growing up on the farm I developed an overwhelming sense of community with the landscape, a reciprocal give and take to life. I was an active part of that population; everyone who occupied that ground was alive with it. It was that community that built my very notion of family and defined the idea of home. What is a person’s body, family, community, landscape (in pieces or in its wonderful entirety) if not a home? And even though it has been 15 years since we loaded the house into a truck and left nature sitting in the fields, that home, is still with me.