From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

My understanding and practice of landscaping is limited to the home and garden variety. Even at this level of home maintenance my skills and interests are limited. And I should be vacationing at a national park, say, the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, I would be as Moses standing on Pisgah taking in the general effect of the scenery from a distance. It comes as an entirely new revelation then, for one to be connected to or be part of a landscape takes more than Scott's fertilizers for the lawn, bordered fences, or sightseeing the Yosemite Valley. After accepting a teaching position at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the author and her poet husband make their home in the Finger Lakes Region at upstate New York. There, the author begins her interrogative journey on this vast landscape of terra incognita and eventually finding herself (and does her family) to belong to the land(scape) and not merely as a transient trampling through it with indifference. The book is repleted with historical anecdotes, myths, and local interests. It's is not a technical tome about geography, history, and anthropology of the Finger Lakes. Rather, this is the author's journal of how she strives to be with the land upon she dwells. As the author discovers, the landscape is the embodied lessons of the past for the present, and instructions for the future. The scenery of a place is only a prop. Without a landscape there can be no scenery. And that what makes this book rare and instructive. Deborah Hall's work has filled a void in my understanding of our culture. I now think more about the history, the town, and the neigbhorood (including neighbors) where I live. Perhaps too, I will come to know the land where I stand, and not just my own lawn.