A Meditation on Place

(I started this little musing last year, I believe, on one of my flights back to Illinois, and it's taken me about this long to finish it...but I liked it, and I got back to Illinois again this week, so I decided it was a good time to post it. I hope you like it, too. :))

Love for a place is probably more irrational than love for a person. It's certainly harder to satisfy. A person you can hug, and touch, and sit silently with, or at worst, talk to on the phone, or Skype. But a place, you can only be in. And it's hard when one loves more than one place...especially for more than one reason.

But missing a person and missing a place feel similar--an ache that says that something is missing. And when one loves more than one place, that ache will always be there.

Be careful, then, where you fall in love with. 

Sometimes people love places because the people they love are there, and that's different. But for some reason, I've discovered a capacity to love places Because They Are. I don't know if everyone else has that capacity, but I'm sure most of them do. I just don't hear it talked about often...beyond Chesterton and Pimlico. Incidentally one of my favorite parts of Orthodoxy. 

I love Washington for its mountains, its tree-covered slopes and high rocky cliffs, its misty rain, its clear burbling streams, its evergreen forests, and the plants I know so well, for the color the sky is in the summer. I love it for the hatred its city's inhabitants have for umbrellas, and the way that we say "the mountain is out!" and all know what that means. I love it for the long hours of daylight in the summer, and the long hours of darkness in the winter. It's the place that nourished me, where I grew, and the landscape, as well as the city, are a part of me. I fit there. The streets enfold me, and the mountains calm me like a blanket. I love it for all of these things, and I love it because it is itself. 

But I love Illinois for the melancholy of its flatness, for the rows of trees that enclose the fields of corn, for the fields lying fallow in the winter. I love its loneliness and desolation, the marks of a place that has been taken from itself and remade. I love the places where it has folded in on itself and kept its nature--the canyons of the Illinois River, and the wetlands, guarded so jealously by its residents. I love its red-winged blackbirds by every highway. I love it for all of these things, and I love it because it is itself. 

And I think I can see Illinois more clearly than I can see Washington, because Washington is like my own skin--I don't always pay attention to it in the same way.

And yet, the moment when I'm flying home from Illinois and see the first mountains and true bodies of saltwater, my soul leaps, and it feels like I can breath again, after forgetting how for many months. 

Even so, when I'm flying back to college at the end of the summer, as I did this week, there's a special thrill to seeing the flat fields as we descend, traversed only by the occasional road and train track. Looking down, I can almost hear the lonely whistles of the trains. 

This is what I mean. Be careful where you fall in love with. 

Those are my great loves. But I have small loves for other places, not the huge aching love for Washington, and the growing love for Illinois, but things that could grow into something along those lines. Friendships with places, if you will. California for its golden hills and sagebrush and eucalyptus, for its San Francisco and its strange plants and its Dominicans. And, to a lesser degree, Tennessee for its soft mountains, for its Fall-like Springs, and for the way it folds in on its little farms, and also the East Coast for its old streets and cemeteries, for New York and Boston, and for the irregular farms, straddling the ridges. 

But I must be careful where I fall in love with.

So...have you experienced what I'm talking about? What are some places that you love, perhaps irrationally? Tell me about them!