Where We Live
A Guest in Ordinary Time
This is the first essay in a series of 4 on the subject of attention. If you are interested, the other three:
Bruton - About seeing people
The Watch - About time
Everything - Coming Sunday
Enjoy this latest essay!
In London, you do things, take in the theatre, see a museum, close a deal. You visit places with character, indexed and sorted: Camden Lock, Carnaby Street, and Buckingham Palace are set pieces. Mayfair is a performance. London wants to be consumed.
Somerset shifts. Time is in the pores of the land. I am drawn to places that drip with time like cathedrals and fens.
Nature here abides, tidy, waiting to devour.
It is winter. The trees are bare, less an argument with death than a long-concluded truce. The hedgerows are clumped time, gnarled roots holding together edges laid with a lost intent, creating facts that grow. Alfred’s Tower looms in the mist, an eighteenth-century bookmark.
I am an observer in Somerset. This is not my home.
There are two older couples behind us at the Three Horseshoes pub, debating a familiar topic. The men do not understand the point their wives were making. They interrupt. They are bound in argument, debating shadows, loving past each other.
At the bar, there is a young couple, American. She is black, and he is of Indian descent. One of their children cannot sit on the barstool. It is not, they say, that she cannot sit, but that she will, without warning or explanation, tip to the side and just fall off. No screaming or terror, like a Jenga tower at the end of a round. Toppling. A mystery. When I stick my tongue out, she temporarily removes her pacifier to return the favor. She returns my goodbye.
Outside the pub, a tower rises, a church squatting patiently at its hem. The pastor will teach you how to ring the bells. How long have they been ringing?
I want to pull the bell cord. The silence begs for it. Nobody will stop me. But I am not entitled to disrupt, though I ache to. I am a guest, even as I feel rooted here.
One of the waitresses tries to get us a table while we settle at the bar, but the diners won’t leave. She resigns herself, and I want to give her a hug. I don’t, but she would have appreciated it. Most people do, even if they don’t.
In Frome, the shops are all independent, the merchants tell me, and this is important to them. The High Street is the market stall, domesticated. Quieter and mannered. A place for everything and a tiny unheard scream from each shopkeeper, their aesthetic vision always flirting with collapse. One store is almost empty but smells perfectly odd. I buy a small, framed wood print of a blackbird and its Latin name, Turdus merula. The store owner wraps it with care.
It is raining and not raining. It changes. There is a tiny bookstore - too full of books and too many readers. It is holding all of us in for a moment because we let it. There is a book about the hidden churches of England and one about rivers. I want both.
Nobody asks if I am an American.
At a small design shop, the woman behind the counter is playing the Lemonheads, and we are both back in the nineties. The acoustic guitar and vocals are a thin sinew holding us to a moment. I suggest a Tear-stained Eye by Son Volt, and she chooses it. She smiles as the door closes.
The coffee shop is cozy. I remark to the woman behind the bar that they should work harder at it, perhaps a few afghans or a doily. She understands and apologizes with a smirk. The donut I buy is grotesque and delicious. I think it is a dare. The coffee takes forever. That is fine.
Somerset is in ordinary time, even during Lent.
The roads should be terrifying, but aren’t. The lane is not wide enough for two cars. It is maddening, yet it flows. Where is the space? Each of us is moving, driving, plotting, going nowhere pleasantly. I once thought that grace was space, but perhaps it is yielding. I have been wrong before.
The stately home is awkward. We pay to park. That is a lie: someone lets us use their annual pass to park because they watch me at the pay station, and I am clearly incompetent. The house is big, and some of the windows are bricked up. Did the bricklayers smirk during that job? Other windows look out over determined allées toward the temple to Apollo, or Hermes. Artemis would know the difference. The owners didn’t.
The land does not consent.
New growth in early March, too early for the rhododendron and probably for the magnolia, but nobody told them. There is more energy in the square inch of land beneath this Lenten rose bush than in the new server farm on the greenbelt.
There are more babies here, too young for memories. I want to believe the land will remember them.
It is cold and damp. We cannot see the sun. We return to our hotel in Bruton.
The wooden beams above the bed are tired. They have waited so long. They will endure what comes through. A 70-year-old stonemason repointed this building. It is prepared. We are not. I exhale. This is not a sprint. What would it feel like to mix mortar? Do the stones know the care? The mason has no apprentice.
I won’t move here. My family is in the States, and perhaps I am not bold enough. But I am here, and I won’t leave.