Choptank: On acceptance, and Place

Oh, Chop.

I love it here. When I was little we moved in to a plastic-siding house on a plot of land backed up against a tobacco field. Dad put a swingset out back, first the aluminum kind with the poles that rose up out of the ground when you got to pumping your legs really hard on the swing, then a chic wood one with rope ladders and a see-saw. My uncles and the neighbors came over one weekend and put up a wood fence, the kind with two posts on either side and two going length-wise in 8 x 5 tracks all around the backyard. You could climb it easily, or sit on the top rung of it, and the wood eventually grew dusty and warped from the summer sun. We had a wide yard with grass that was yellow and crunchy and hurt your feet by August. Eventually mom and dad built a small screened in porch on the back of the place and we ate dinner out there and my favorite was cook-outs, which we had a lot off and which I still yearn for, and organize now in the summer all the time. It was the suburbs, we were the fourteenth house in that neighborhood in Dec of 1980 and when we moved a decade or so later there were close to three hundred or so. It sprung a pang in my heart, even young like that, to see the farms lost, or the spots in the woods where we'd sneak off to where the old streams and black bows of trees hung, the creeks with the rope swings that creaked when you swung, the old dirt roads that even then we knew had secrets, all that wild area coveted because it was off limits according to the grown-ups. It hurt a bit even then to see it get paved over and disappear. But we lived the burgeoning 1980's fast-money suburb dream and I was raised to not question it: first VCR, MTV, first microwave, wow convenience and American life sure was fun!

I'm not sure when my mind changed about all of that, or if change is the right word. College on the rural side of the Chesapeake Bay, amid the farm lands and all the little antiquated towns of history run along the backroads here had a lot to do with it. Anyhow I was talking to a friend last night about sense of place. Identity and belonging. I believe that where we are from, regardless our consciousness of it, holds so many clues to the whole of who we are. The consciousness or in other words the regularities of your way of life there, this is so shaped by the land, by the very landscape to which you've grown accustomed. And by landscape I mean in its sociological entirety: are your surroundings city streets, are they strip malls, are they well-manicured lawns with a cement driveway and two car garage? And grown accustomed isn't the right term either, more appropriately I would say taken for granted. As in born in to, never having the experience of knowing anything different.

This morning, out my backdoor, these were my surroundings:

I took my coffee out to the Pier it was so, soo still. The Choptank River. No matter what, she calls my name. Sometimes, when I come home late as I often do, worn to the bone from giving so much of myself to work, I get out of the car and in the dark what I hear is the quiet gentle lapping of her incoming tide. Sometimes, a day or two before a storm, she is so eerily like the ocean--fast-moving--that it puts a chill on me. And then, like today, she is calm and still, quiet, reminding. All is Well. I stood out there breathing it in, with no means of escaping the perfect quiet contentment in my heart. It rained a long, soaking spring rain yesterday and today it is delicious out, about 55 and by the afternoon with all the day's sun everything will be stunning green. How precious, this gift of life and the reminder of the circles. The regularity of the changing, passing tide. The periodic wild currents, the peaked stillness at times, the shocking moments when the water rides far, far out and the brown mud is exposed and the marsh grass grows dry. And I, I here, get to take it all in.

I saw three different muskrats this morning. Three at different times. In all my life I've only ever seen one. Here is the totem medicine of muskrat (from http://lowestoftspiritualcentre.co.uk/Animaltotum.aspx): Grace, keeping ones own counsel, silent observation. In the silence, after watching the third little muskrat float and surface again and again among the reeds, I was startled by a giant splash. Behind me an osprey was lifting out of the water with a squiggling perch speared in its talons. Life eats life, you know? It's how we go, how we grow. I am so thankful to be at this place, and this Place, in my own cycle.

Today is hopefully the final day of moving off the farm. And just so were clear, when it's all said and done and I am sitting out back at low tide with the white metal legs of my beach chair sunk deep in the mud, I will probably at some point jump up, drive an hour across the bridge to the other side, eat some fricken sushi and go to the mall. Cuz life is life, all of it, every blessed part. It's just so amazing getting to walk all of it, eyes opened as they can be to every part of the whole.