No Place Like Home

I think anyone who lives in this city for longer than five minutes and has children has the inevitable city vs. suburb question.  The schools here are mostly a disaster, and the ones that are good are way over capacity.  The incoming kindergarten classes this fall are going to have 33 students in them, and we've watched as supplementary teaching staff and other crucial school services are cut in the name of funding gold-plated pension plans.  It's not a pretty prospect.  That leaves private schooling, which gets expensive, once you start tallying up children.  One of Piglet's classmates is an only child for precisely this reason.  The city vs. suburb question is one that my husband and I keep going around and around on.  We think we've settled it, and then something happens and we think again, "should we move? are we making the best decision for our family's well-being?"



What came to me recently was that our recurrent discussion, and the feeling of rootlessness that seems to plague us no matter what we do, is not so much a question of city vs. suburban or rural living, but rather a question of place.  I recently finished reading Rod Dreher's new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, and my takeaway from that book is that having roots is a good thing, but that our post-modern way of life is quite at odds with maintaining those roots.  Dreher talks extensively about how the community of Starhill, Louisiana came alongside his family when his sister became sick with lung cancer, and how the community cared for her and the family throughout the illness, and even beyond her death.  They did so because the Dreher and Leming families have been there for generations, and are known.  The good, the bad, and the ugly, the people of West Feliciana parish know one another, and as such, can provide the sort of support and care that helps a family thrive.  Family and community ties become the thing that makes Dreher and his wife pack up their home in Philadelphia and move back to Louisiana after Ruthie's death.  Mr and Mrs Dreher have a unique opportunity to return to where they were once rooted, and plant their feet once again and they take it, with fear and trembling, for better or worse.



It is an opportunity not available to us.  My husband and I both moved around a lot growing up, and the places our parents live now are not places where either of us has roots of any kind.  My parents stopped moving when I was in high school, but as I left home at 18, I lived in their current town for only four years before leaving for good.  I've returned for visits several times a year, of course, and I'm familiar with the people in their lives, and with the place, but it doesn't belong to me, nor I to it.  My parents' parents had similarly nomadic existences owing to vocation and duty, and so going back two generations there is a sense of rootlessness, of unknowing.  I have a good relationship with my family, and I dearly love going home to my parents, but for me, going home to my family is more a matter of people than of place.  My parents have now lived in their town for 20 years, and have put down roots.  They have a circle of friends, of people who know them, love them, and have grown older with them.  The people near and dear to them, their church family and friends have largely grown up in the years since I've been gone.  I know the people of their town, but don't know them, nor do they know me.




"When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another," writes essayist Wendell Berry.  "How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another's stories? If they do not know one another's stories, how can they know whether o not to trust one another?  People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover, they fear one another.  And this is our predicament now." (quoted in Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, 208).



I've often thought about what I'd do if we didn't have to stay in this city for my husband's job.  There is much that has changed the longer we've lived in Philly: we've developed good relationships with our neighbors such that our block feels a bit like a community.  We have a few friends in the area, and we feel more rooted in our Princeton parish now that we've been there for a few years.  These things take time, and most importantly, they take stability--the ability to keep one's feet on the ground.  Dreher mentions it when he talks about the process he and his wife went through to discuss moving back home.  He knew that going back home wasn't going to be wine and roses, and that the community had shown its best side during his sister's ordeal, but that living there would be to take the good with the bad, the beautiful with the ugly, the romantic with the pragmatic.  Dreher notes that there is a sort of discipline in staying put in a community for a long time, of finding place where you are.  That discipline provides an opportunity for humility, and with humility comes happiness (Dreher, 225).



I share Dreher's struggles with knowing self and place; like him, I've always been itchy for the bigger world, to travel, to learn and know that which lay beyond my own borders.  As I get older, however, I see the value in someone like Ruthie Leming's always knowing her place in the world and finding contentment within her own small borders.  I find myself wanting some of that, but I don't exactly know how to effect it, given the circumstances of our lives.  We have no Starhill to return to, and even if we did, my husband's job is far less portable than Dreher's.



So I find myself going back to St. Benedict of Nursia, whom Dreher references several times toward the end of the book.  St. Benedict writes that we should "not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation.  It is bound to be narrow at the outset" (Dreher, 237).  Perhaps our stability is in keeping our feet on the ground here, and staying the course, despite our questions, our misgivings, our sometimes loneliness, our longing for nearby family.  I can't undo the things I've done, or unsee what I've seen, or unlive the life that has gone before--all my experiences away from home and family have shaped who I am today.  All I can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, and try to be present in this place, for this season, however long it lasts.  Dreher writes, "There has to be balance.  Not everyone is meant to stay--or to stay away--forever.  There are seasons in the lives of persons and of families.  Our responsibility, both to ourselves and to each other, is to seek harmony within the limits of what we are given--and to give each other grace" (Dreher, 262).


Steady on, stay the course, keep the faith.