On Land

In the framing device of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), two farming communes argue over the ownership of a piece of land. One wants it to grow fruit trees; before the political disruption previous to the start of the play, the other commune raised goats there, and they want it back to continue doing the same. In the end, the land is awarded to the fruit farmers because they’ll use it better.

When I saw the play, I didn’t know how to feel about that. I see the sense of the judgement: if you aren’t going to read it, why not give the book to someone who will? If it will benefit everyone to award the land to the fruit farmers, strike a blow for the greater good. The goat farmers can find literally anywhere else to graze their hardy livestock.

But, as in the case of the petit prince‘s rose, perhaps what is essential isn’t always visible to the eye.

Though they aren’t quantifiable, feelings are real. And positive feelings like attachment, love, and community are some of the things that make like worth living. I’m not saying we should (or shouldn’t) feel about land the way we feel about people, but sometimes a specific piece of land enables and nourishes those feelings toward ourselves and each other.

Now, feelings about land are so important to so many people that at the time of writing this, there are at least two major, saddening international conflicts you might think I’m “really” talking about, along with pretty much every colonial or former colonial country. I’m not. But such conflicts are so common that I have no doubt at whatever time you read this, we’ll all be lucky if there are only two.

The only thing I’m really talking about is personal.

I’ve never lived in a house or apartment I assumed would be my home forever. I knew I’d have to move out of my parents’ house when I grew up, and since I’ve not yet reached that phase of life often referred to as “settling down,” I assume there will always be another apartment after this one. And after that. I live in a time, class, and culture where property doesn’t get passed from generation to generation. Family members who grew up in the same city might choose to live across the border or overseas. If I get a new job, I might uproot, too. I assume that even if I do own a house someday, when I get old enough, I’ll “downsize” to a smaller place.

I always figured I cared more about people than places. What does it matter where I am so long as my physical needs are met and I’m with the people I love? I have little interest in travel for its own sake; I just want to create memories with my friends and family.

But it turns out that’s not true.

There are many ways I’m extremely lucky, but the brightest way Fortune has smiled on me is my family (on both sides, though the subject of this blog means I’m focusing more on one than the other). I know great people who have strained relationships with their parents and siblings, let alone their aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, but our family is the kind you read about in children’s books.

My first cousins are important enough to me that my friends who’ve never met them can sometimes identify which names-have-been-changed-to-protect-the-innocent “one of my cousins” is the protagonist of an anecdote. When I introduce my extended family to people, I just say “this is my cousin,” because I literally can’t manage the complicated “-removed”s and ordinals other than “first.” We welcome boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, family friends, other-side-grandparents/cousins/aunts/uncles, best friends, random acquaintances into the fold like we’re auditioning for the part of the muggle-world Weasleys. I know that no matter where I am or what’s happening, I could pick up the phone and call my nearest family and have their help in a second.

But every silver lining has its cloud, and the thing about people is they change. I know that someday, neither of my parents will be here. That just as the number of cousins grows with marriages and births, it will also decrease.

I never met my mother’s father except through our family cottage: the photos on the wall in later years, but also the fishing trophy on the wall. The second twin bed in my grandma’s room. The bits and pieces around, the patterns of use of objects — furniture, pumps, rooms — were all testament to things he did and ways he behaved before any of us young ‘uns were born.

My late grandmother’s influence on the cottage is more obvious. My aunt and uncle have framed the handwritten instructions she wrote to help her children and grandchildren navigate the complexities of not upsetting the septic system. Although she passed away over a decade ago, the bedroom closest to the front of the cottage is still hers, and it’s still her name we brandish when someone dares toss wet clothing on the floor or leave the fridge door ajar. We still wash and store the dishes the way she taught us to.

Why is that relevant? Well, there’s nothing we do at the cottage that we couldn’t do elsewhere. A more modern, heated building with more bedrooms would better suit our sprawling family. Direct access to the lake and potable tap water would also be nice. And there are plenty of fields where we can play pick-up games of soccer, catch, football, and Frisbee without stumbling over the septic-tank hill or accidentally hitting the cars. We can even move all the photos, the plastic cups we all grew up drinking out of, the fishing trophies, the furniture. So why does our cottage matter?

It matters because the land is never empty to us. It’s always full of the shadows of our younger selves, our family, their younger selves, discovering the same patch of soft grass on the way down to the dock or trudging to the pump (the old one you actually had to pump, the spigot on the side of the garage, or the tap on the other side of the garage) to fetch a pitcher of drinking water. Laughing with each other and slamming the screen door in temper tantrums. A dozen dogs and cats — ours and neighbours’ — vie for attention underfoot.

There is something to having a place so stuffed with memories that you know it the way you know your own mind, which is to say sometimes not at all and sometimes differently from all the other people who know it from different perspectives but always with familiarity and always with the certainty that it will be there as long as you are, because what “you” could possibly exist without it?

Our cottage is what forever means to me. It’s where my family is, all of us, even the ones who are no longer with us, even the second- and third- and -removed cousins, even the ones we used to be before we grew up or older.  It’s the ground in which my roots dig deep to weather everything from breezes to gales.

What it boils down to is this: when I say I like a place, I mean it reminds me of our family cottage. It makes me feel they way I feel when I’m there: not necessarily happy or sad, but real. Our cottage is where I learned to be myself.

Land–land that is home–is memory and identity. It is knowledge of self and of the past. It isn’t any of these things because it’s special in itself; it is these things because that is what the people who use it and love it make of it and themselves.

Brecht’s goat farmers might be able to feed their animals anywhere, which makes planting fruit trees a more profitable use of the disputed valley on paper. But what price can be put on the herders’ love for their home? For that matter, what price on the fruit farmers’ love of the same place? Meaning and meaningfulness can’t be judged by arithmetic, though they’re the source of the world’s most difficult and important problems.