A Paean for Place
"Whatsoever things are . . . lovely . . . think on these things." Philippians 4:8
A Paean for Place
By Foy Valentine
Paean: A song of praise or exultation.
Place: A portion of space; a definite location; a spot devoted to a specified purpose; an area.
A body is blessed who has a strong sense of place. Knowing the place where we are helps us to know the persons who we are. Also, if we are clear about the place where we have come from , we can better understand the place where we are now, and we can better see the place where we need to be.
Geography`s demise is humanity`s loss.
In all the history of humanity, there has probably never before been a time when there is as much voluntary migration as there is in the world today. The resulting loss of familiar place tends to bring about disorientation and alienation.
If we belong to no place, we have no bearings. Not to have bearings, not to be oriented to Place and Time, not to exist in relationship to fixed points is, by definition, to be lost.
Part of the punishment borne by Adam and Eve was that they were banished from their Place, driven out by the great God Almighty from the Garden, doomed to dwell East of Eden, displaced.
When Cain had killed his brother Abel, he too was displaced, "driven…away from the ground" to "be a fugitive and a wanderer….away from the presence of the Lord," where he, too, "dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden" (Genesis 4:14-16).
My home Place holds such good memories for me that it doesn`t even have to be a good day for me to bask in recollections related to it.
Although I lived there only 17 years, from birth until I went away to college, the solidities, realities, specifics, and verities of that Place seem more concrete and more satisfyingly solid as the years go by.
No, we were not upwardly mobile. Nor downwardly mobile. Nor sidewardly mobile. We stayed put. In that Place. As Greenwich in London is the bearing point from which all modern latitudinal and longitudinal measurements and orientations are reckoned the wide world over, so our Place was the only Greenwich I knew anything about from my birth to my Exodus from Edgewood. Our dogs and cats were oriented to that Place. The cows and their calves were oriented to that Place. Even the mules were oriented to that Place for after the Great Depression shifted into overdrive in the early 1930s and the family Ford was sold, our family went about three miles to church every Sunday in a narrow tired wagon pulled by two lively mules, Steve and Red; and you had better believe they knew their way back home to their Place, and ours, without benefit of a $1,000 transponder to bounce signals off a satellite, compute their location, and then provide them with a transistorized display of where they were so that they might then decide where they were and then go home. Thus it becomes crystal clear that Steve and Red were smarter than the thousand dollar option on a new Cadillac. Oh, pretension. And consummate silliness.
Our Place was blessed with a fireplace, and that fireplace in the wintertime conjures up, what else?, my warmest memories. There were roaring fires, glowing coals, hot ashes, cherry red hot andirons, flickering firelight, great oak backlogs, and pleasant, small poppings to toast cold feet, dry out wet britches, banish the chill, and resist the fierce aggressions of the infamous Texas Blue Northers.
The dining room makes that whole Place still smell good in my mind`s nose. If my mother had not been such a good cook I might not be a fat man today. The Mother God gave me gave me to eat (as Adam said to the Lord, blaming Him for his sin) and I did eat, and eat, and eat–hot biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, fresh pork ribs, coconut pie, and so on and so forth.
The porches of that Place pleasured me. There was a fine, long porch across the entire front of the house. A big L-shaped back porch at the back of the house domiciled a massive old ice box (the kind you stored great chunks of ice in, chopped from the tank in the wintertime), an old tin safe, an adjoining cistern from which we drew our drinking water, and a pleasant corner in which boys in the summertime could luxuriate in a few buckets of water in Number Two washtubs. Well, where else do you think we could have performed our ablutions? Nobody had bathrooms inside the house for heaven`s sake. Nobody had running water. Nobody had electricity. Nobody had nothing. We are talking Early Primitive.
I liked my upstairs bedroom Place. I had it all to myself for five years after my brother went away to college. Thought he never would clear out. I slept with the windows open most of the time. The great magnolia tree`s blooms fragranced the Place, the strong clear call of the whip-poor-wills were more soothing to the ears than the 10 o`clock news and Jay Leno put together, and frequent visitations of startlingly loud hoot owls signaled that there was out there in the dark a whole nother world.
I especially relish the memory of the trees of that Place: great old post oaks (still there and probably at least two hundred years old by now), some blackjacks, elms, a wonderful big hickory, the magnolia, crape myrtles, some hackberries; and the big fig tree from which my mother made mouth-watering fig preserves which won the blue ribbons at the annual Van Zandt County Fairs, and under which one pleasant Sunday morning there coiled a territorially jealous copperhead snake that, when I stepped under the tree to gather figs, unceremoniously bit me, apparently without a qualm, and very nearly killed me; and, a quarter of a mile away there were the woods themselves with squirrels, possums, bees, bird nests, little saplings (to be climbed and ridden to the ground by little saps), and big trees to be chopped partly down by my father with a double bit axe and then felled by my brother and me with a two-man cross cut saw. (In this context, a "two-person" cross cut saw would strike me as being just a shade too much, the gender revolution notwithstanding–"pedantic effrontery up with which I will not put," as Winston Churchill is said to have said). Anyhow, what did you think we used to cut fire wood and stove wood with? A big, shiny, yellow McCullough chain saw? They hadn`t been dreamed of; gasoline was not available; and there was no money. No problem. We cut the wood. Fine and dandy.
I liked the tank at our Place. It was big and deep, especially at the south end near the dam. And it was splendidly peopled with channel catfish for trotlines, bullfrogs for symphonies of incomparably memorable, altogether pleasant, bass croaking that still rings in my significantly challenged auditory nerves.
And I liked the barn. The barn was very special at our Place. A small body could swing by his arms from rafter to rafter, from one crib to another, then across the whole loft, and then back again. The scent of the hay and the corn, the delicious feel of tumbling in the cottonseed bin, and the smell, not really good and not really bad, of the cows and horses and chickens and geese and an occasional brood sow, brought inside the barn when she was ready to make her marvelous birthing bed of shucks and straw and find her pigs–all these come vividly to mind.
So, I call this squib a Paean for Place. I exult in such measure of orientation as I have because of my experience with this Place where I grew up. And I hope you are disposed to consider such Place or Places as may be personally meaningful, restorative, even redemptive to you.
It helps to reckon your position now and then, to determine again your bearings, to "look to the rock whence you were hewn…to the…pit whence you were digged" (Isaiah 51:1).
It can be a spiritually enriching, psychically steadying exercise. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and knowing who you are comes in a close second. And Place is very special in helping you know who you are.
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