Place Holders

I believe that place holds us, and not the other way around. At any given moment, we are what we touch, see, hear, smell, and taste; our building blocks for memory, for thought. This is home.

The summer slow-melts from summer to early autumn here in the Appalachians of Western North Carolina. Spring climbs up the ridges turning green at the highest altitudes last. Autumn slides back down from Mitchell and Winter Star and Clingman’s Dome to the South Toe and Swannanoa Valleys in shades of magenta, tangerine, lemon, lime. The dogwoods blush slowly like teen girls. You can mark the poison ivy easily by the carmine stripes winding the trunks of maples and oaks that remain full-leafed and green in mid-September.

Meanwhile my bird feeders, front and back, are busy as big city bus stops. The black-capped chickadees and titmice wait in the wraith of thorny hedge I hate. I leave it for their safety while they wait their turn at the feeder. Pairs of Cardinals, the Hairy and the Downy woodpeckers, the occasional thrasher or starling all take precedence over the smaller birds. Finally the little ones will form gangs, tiny thugs all puffed up in gray, white, and black feathers, ready to take the feeder by force.

The goldfinch, dapper in his bright yellow zoot suit with black lapels, contentedly perches atop a spiky echinacea seedpod dipping back and forth in a North wind drizzle. He delicately plucks the remaining seeds, a treat as fine to him as movie theater popcorn on a damp autumn day would be to you and me. His balancing act is as foreign to me as Chinese instructions on a new desk chair. This only serves to make him my favorite. As I watch, some weight shifts inside my chest, where my heart can grow heavy until it tilts, lights flashing and bells dinging like an old pinball machine. The scales slowly even. He is balancing me.

All the while they talk amongst themselves in their twitters and whistles, the titmice fussing when the food gets low. The hummingbirds, hum and buzz, with the slightest satisfied chirp now and then. They too will order me around when the sugar water reaches a certain level. They are audacious little rascals, flying right up to my face, or buzzing around my head. I know they don’t want me to take it yet. The dregs are their favorite part. They want me to make their new juice now, so they don’t have to suffer the procrastination of fools.

The squirrels have moved into more forested regions where acorns are falling. They also behave better now that I feed them. At first, I thought to shoot them, especially when they began to tease poor little blind Butterbean, my dachshund. They would hang just inside the fence chitter-chattering at her until she gave chase then they would leap through the link holes, while she ran headlong into the fence. This was so startling to her that it broke my heart. So I admit to shooting off a round or two from a little Walther .22 semi, but I’m not the shot I used to be. There IS one with a white scar on his left rump and I reckon I grazed him. A friend said, “ If you want them to stay out of the fence, you gotta feed them.” This advice seemed all wrong, but I bought the wild feed full of corn and unshucked peanuts, and they backed right the fuck off. I am still amazed. (Try not to make me feel bad about that damn squirrel. I have worse demons to wrestle, and you’ll be wasting your breath.)

Everything is hungrier this September than last. That and the solid black bodies of wooly bear caterpillars, which may be an old wives’ tale, but they are darn good predictors of hard winters I’ve found. The belief rings shivers like a pebble thrown in a pond that there may be a cold wind about to blow strong, perhaps through April. I don’t mind. My SAD occurs now in summer. I’ll be glad to see Jack Frost throw down his jeweled carpet again.

The rains have come, filling my little spring fed creek behind the house. That creek and the land on either side actually belong to the state of NC, however no official can access it as it is surrounded by private properties, and so it is ours. I love this. Of course, that little creek is beholding to no one but itself. Still, the idea that we share it as the People of the State of NC tickles me. It’s safe with us. The Woodland Creek gurgles and chuckles its way over stones as it fills with rain and runoff winding its way to the Swannanoa River a mile down the road. The entire property smells of water and wet green leaves, a few yellow ones drifting down to brighten the softening layer over what is no more than hard rock and clay.

My two sentinels, giant poplars that loom a hundred feet high, at least, stand between my house and the creek. I love these two trees, despite the fact that one night when I was roaming late and the moon backlit their trunks and branches, I could see exactly by the shadows cast against the clapboard what would happen to my house, as well as to Bean and me, should one, or just the top of one, fall. It seems as good a way to go as any. I could never cut a branch of those trees, my guardians, and I have instructed any friends, whoever writes my obit, to say simply, “She was felled by a tree.” After all we’ve done to them, this seems a fitting death for a human.

I am now so immersed in the writing communities of Substack that I can see when there are trends in the fine writers/teachers that I follow. They tack into the wind of that particular theme, each with a slightly different course, a bit of handy craft to offer on whatever subject might rock the boat of all those who would and want to write. They know that first we must learn to pay close attention. In the past couple of weeks, the subject has been “place.”

When I wrote one of my fave teachers, Joanna, who writes

Muse with JPC

, and told her I had been sick and missed my own deadline to post, she told me that her son had Covid, then she got Covid, but went on as if this had not interfered terribly with her deadline. For several nights, the congestion in my head was so bad from this viral cold, all my teeth hurt. Night time, when one should be recovering, was the worst. I didn’t sleep for days.

I know, whine, right? However, my teach said, why don’t you just write about five observations about your new place and the changes its going through now, that you weren’t there to observe last year. So that is what I have done. On Substack, where I subscribe to some of the best authors and teachers I’ve ever known, there is a sort of synchronicity that happens in their posts. It’s so natural, each different in their approach, I can’t imagine that they are reading each others’ posts and playing off them. Rather, it only proves what I’ve intuitively known for as long as I’ve been writing; ideas and creativity have their own timing. It is outside the constructs of manmade time. The golden thread runs through everything, and when these writers pay attention, they are bound to catch hold at the same place now and then.

For the past couple of weeks, “place” in writing seemed to have their imaginations tight within its grasp. Now, Janisse Ray, whose year long course called “Journey in Place”

Trackless Wild with Janisse Ray

has increased my awareness of my brand new place (as of January 2024) a hundred fold. Because of her, I have a “sit spot,” an altar to the land where I live, and she has given me the chutzpah to awaken to its many charms enough to begin writing again. I can never express all the gratitude I have for her. Then a new mentor/teacher/

Jeannine Ouellette

with her Substack, Writing in the Dark, wrote about the importance of place. Finally, here was the suggestion from my friend, Joanna. Heads up everyone. Pay attention. This sort of thing happens when you have a good hold on the thread that connects you with all of Life and the Universe.

Not that I don’t have some questions for these fine writers, about place and about the many homes I can travel in my mind on any given day. Has there ever been a place I did not fall in love with in some way? A place that did not make me homesick once I left it? I can’t think of one. Not even Kansas; my apologies to Kansans everywhere. Even in Kansas where I was stationed in the USAF at McConnell AFB for a year, I found things to love. Skies chock full of stars that reached to the end of the earth. Endless fields of long grasses waving in the wind and sun. The stoney walls and canyons where my ancestors, the outlaw Younger brothers, ran stolen horses to be corralled on three sides so they would only have to set armed guards on the open end. Cole Younger’s name cut into the stone of one of those canyons. We’ll look at this question next time. Can you truly know a place when you have had to move often; when you don’t know a single place as home-home?

Until then, how about you write five things in the comments below about YOUR place—or any place you call or have called home. I know good folk all over this country, but mostly in the South, in the Ozarks, or Appalachia. I have several family members in Texas. It’s your turn to love on the place where you live, in words. Do it here. Do it now. Write on, friends, as I say goodnight to the mountain that skylines beyond my bedroom window. Tomorrow, I will greet her good morning.