LifeScapes #1

Spider Month at MeadowKnoll

I aspire to become an inhabitant . . . Only by understanding where I live can I learn how to live.—Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World

August is Spider Month on our Texas hill country homestead. We find them everywhere in late summer—on the floor, in the yard, dangling overhead. The big mama Golden Orb Weaver —sometimes called a writing spider because of her zigzag web anchor—is our favorite. [Correction via a friend: This is a Garden Spider, Argiope aurantia, also called a writing spider. Good to know!]

This is Louisa, scribbling her ZZs between the trellis and the chicken coop window. Named after Louisa May Alcott (one of the “scribbling women” who so annoyed Nathaniel Hawthorne), she is there every morning when I go out to feed the chickens. At home in her place, industriously writing, connected and contented (I assume) Louisa doesn’t seem to know that I am watching her. She has no idea that—for me—her small spider life has a larger significance.

I’m telling you this because I often feel as if I’m perched, like Louisa, in the middle of an immense but invisible web that stretches around the globe, reaching wherever you are from the place where I’m writing this post, here at the far end of a gravel lane in Burnet County, fifty-some miles northwest of Austin, at 30°44′41″N 98°1′5″W (according to my phone’s compass app). As you can see, we’re on the 98th meridian: historically, the dividing line between east and west, where everything changes. Some of you have been reading LifeScapes for a while and have been introduced to this place—MeadowKnoll, we call it. But for new readers, let me sketch the backstory.

Bill and I married at midlife, after both of us had made places for ourselves in the career culture. But we were both fed up with competitive workplace politics and the harum-scarum rush  of city  life. Ready to leave his IT job, Bill had bought five acres of meadows and woods and built a tiny weekend cabin there. I had left my tenured university position and begun freelance writing.  Both of us wanted to work for ourselves, from home, and were crazy enough to think the writing might support us. We had read E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and were committed to paring down possessions and expenses, living lightly and sustainably, and producing what we consumed, as far as that was possible. The writing was a passion, yes, for  me, anyway. But it was more: a means to an end, and the end—the most essential thing—was living a life on the land and learning what that meant.

We did it step-wise, those first years. We moved out to Bill’s land, where we lived in a used single-wide trailer for the first eight years, then in a modest-sized cottage. You can see images of our place in the video I made in 2009, when Together, Alone was published.

That video was made 14 years ago. We don’t have as many animals now and droughts have reduced the garden to mostly herbs and native plants. Climate change in 2023 has brought us an unusually cold winter with a massive ice storm and the hottest summer on record: to date, 84 days without rain and 47 straight days of 100+ temperatures, evaporating every last ounce of soil moisture and stressing every plant and animal. We know we’re in for many major lifestyle adjustments. But we’re committed to “aging in place,” as it’s known these years: in this place, for as long as we can. And we still believe that the more lightly we live on the land, the longer it will sustain us and our fellow creatures.

But we don’t have to live on a rural homestead to be at home on the earth. One of my favorite “place” books is Barbara Gates’ Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place. Gates writes about the history of her Berkeley, CA house, the geology of the crowded Bay area, the shell mounds of the Native Americans who lived there 5000 years ago. About rats in the fridge and the city dump and traffic. About a placeless woman whose home is her car. Gates goes behind a wall, under a pavement, into old tax records, looking for what’s hidden and showing us that we can find our place in a noisy city block, on a quiet street, or confined to a single room. And our place, any place, can be home.

Journaling is one of Gates’ ways of connecting to her place. It’s been mine, too. . Journaling forces me to focus on what’s happening around me, in front of me, under my feet—and why it matters. In LifeScapes, I’ll be writing about MeadowKnoll, the place I inhabit. The place that inhabits me. And the ways we all inhabit places.

Are you a journaler? If you are, I hope you’ll consider devoting at least some of your pages to the place (or places) you care most about. Below is a prompt I’ve used in my classes. Lots of questions: choose one today, another tomorrow or next week. Learning our place—really learning it—takes a while. Sometimes, a lifetime.

Describe your home, or the place you want to call home. Where is it? What is it? A house, an apartment, a yard, a park, a neighborhood, a patch of land­? What’s around it? What’s the terrain, the temperature/rainfall, what grows there (or doesn’t)? Who inhabits this place? What species? What’s their culture, language/dialect, customs, music, cuisine, costumes, traditions? What’s its history? What’s its future? How many different ways can you view it? And how do you fit in? Why is this home? Why is it important to you?

Like Scott Sanders, I want to be an inhabitant. I don’t know what Louisa the spider wants, but like her, I am scribbling my Zs in my small web, in place here but connected largely, to more inhabitants than I can guess, in ways I cannot possibly comprehend.

I’m curious. Where on earth are you? What place on this planet are you writing from? Please leave us a comment!

Gratefully,
Susan

For more reading: three Substack newsletters that focus on the concept of place from different perspectives: Street Smart Naturalist, by David B. Williams; Place Writing, by Yasmin Chopin; and My Gaia, by Diane Porter.