Our morning walks have been particularly good this past week. The Texas spring is still going strong, and it’s not too hot, not yet. I thought I’d make a “joiner” (from my Instagram stories) in the style of Hockney to celebrate.
My relation to the place
I spent yesterday thinking about these words of Wendell Berry, from his 1968 essay, “A Native Hill”:
I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay.
My wife and I took a magical little walk (just an hour or so after I had written this post!) in a part of town unknown to us and I thought about happy we were to be back here, in the place that suits us, walking and exploring and just living our lives.
The sense of place
“Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.”
—Wallace Stegner, “The Sense of Place”
Back in Texas
“Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it.”
—John Steinbeck
Our Lake Erie Sabbatical is officially over, and we’re back home in Austin, Texas, living just a few blocks south of where we first landed a dozen years ago.
I find it annoying how the older I get the more the clichés ring true. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. (Luckily, you can always turn around.)
I never gave this place the credit it probably deserved. People would say to me, “Oh, living in Austin, that must be so creatively inspiring!” And I’d say, “Well, I don’t know about that. It’s just a nice place to live.” But all my books and sons were born here, and the minute I got back, I started itching to get started on The Next Thing.
Every morning walk in the past two weeks has made me thankful for our return. We visited the Blanton this weekend, and this Jeffrey Gibson piece said it all for me. (I didn’t even look at the title. Every year has its theme.)
Good to be home.
Love among the ruins
This photo of ruins in Antigua, Guatemala is one of my favorite images from the past few years of traveling. (Not shown: the picnicking teenage sweethearts. “Love among the ruins…”)
I’m back in Austin, Texas after several months away in The North, living not far from a city with actual ruins. What hits my eye and sticks in my brain are the cranes and the half-finished buildings. Maybe it’s just the dark mood in me, but the unfinished buildings all look like ruins-in-the-making. And some of the finished buildings, like the parking garage I walked past last night, already look like ruins.
The most recent issue of the Austin Chronicle has a rendered image of a post-apocalyptic Austin on the front cover. (On Twitter I saw somebody joke that it was a well-played “don’t move here” measure.) There’s a creeping feeling that this won’t last. There’s a “correction” coming. But how bad will it be?
Everywhere you go there are abandoned scooters littering the sidewalks, like scooter cemeteries. (Undead? Waiting to be reanimated?)
I still hold love for the place. There’s still some magic lingering here, just as there is everywhere in America. A sunset helps. I walked past that same parking garage a half-hour later and the ruins were glowing, with the moon overhead…