The Romance of Places

This fall I went to Portland and to Boston, the first trips I've taken away from Maren. Flying without a baby is, needless to say, an entirely different experience than wrestling with a tiny monster in the middle seat of row 27. Solo time on an airplane now feels more or less like a spa day: Wine! Reading! Snacks! Netflix!

Traveling without my daughter also gave me the odd sense of having stepped backward in time. I felt an abrupt return to my old self: the me-without-a-child, that pre-mother self. It's not as if this version of me has disappeared or been replaced cleanly with a different identity, but rather like new selves have been layered on top. Traveling without Maren had the odd effect of sloughing off these layers and returning me to the former self still nestled within. Sitting alone on the airplane, I could imagine that I was flying to a grad school residency, or to report a story, or that Davis and I were heading off on an extended trip together rather than three nights away (during which we were alternately gleeful and pulling out our phones to look at Maren photos).

Flying usually makes me sappy (it's not just me, it's science) and these trips were no exception. Looking out the window of the plane, sipping canned wine without the warm heft of a baby bobbing on my lap, I watched the New England landscape slide by underneath. The view was quilted: a patchwork of ocher and emerald fields knit together by seams of flaming trees. The plane banked over the coast and far beneath us a lighthouse stood out from the navy sea like a pin in a map. I was reminded once again of the way landscapes and places can romance us.

During this flight I was reading Still Life by Sarah Winman, a long and luminous novel about family and art and the city of Florence. In one chapter, a poet named Constance Everly takes a young woman named Evelyn under her wing. It's Evelyn's first time in Florence; she's 21 years old and wide open and falls hard for the city. After wandering along the Arno and through the Uffizi, Evelyn describes her day to Constance Everly: the light, the smells, the hum of people. Miss Everly congratulates her for learning the first rule of art: "turning looking into loving." (Isn't that a great phrase? Turning looking into loving?)

Later, Evelyn asks Constance if she remembers her first visit to Florence. Here's their exchange:

- Do you remember your first time?
- Do I indeed! Like Saul falling from his horse and becoming Paul. It changed me. The city spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand, and yet in here—she clasped her chest—I knew exactly what it was saying to me.
- Which was?
- Miss Everly held up four fingers. She said, I. Will. Astonish. You.

Being astonished by a city or a landscape is not cool. This kind of earnestness is unpopular; it's more sophisticated to remain detached and unimpressed. A fierce love of place, whether that place is Florence or the coastal desert of Southern California, can easily sway toward sentimentality—seeing the world as we want it to be, not as is really is. But I'd like to make an argument for earnestness. I think it's a gift to experience the romance of places: to step off a train and be absolutely bowled over by the scent of Neapolitan pizza or the glimpse of an African tulip tree flaring with blossoms. 

We have one brief flash in this world. Why not be awed by clouds outside an airplane window, a patchwork of fields, the thrill of waking up some place new? Why not fall hard for places? This kind of affection might buckle under accusations of sentimentality. So let it. These small, good things are begging us to notice them and to acknowledge: this will not last. Lucky you, I want to say, if you've fallen in love with a place. Lucky you, to find somewhere that suits you and tugs on you from afar, a place that changes but remains fixed, waiting for you to look on it and love it again.

On my shelf

• Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera - Written in fragments, this book constructs something whole from the rubble of pregnancy, postpartum, and the 2017 Mexico City earthquake. I felt nostalgic for this book even before I finished reading it. 

• Still Life by Sarah Winman - See above. Loved this novel.

• Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones - I'm midway through this memoir about traveling through the world with a disabled body, which is also about beauty and desire and motherhood.

Updates

• Speaking of traveling to Boston, here’s why: I'm currently a fellow at the Religion and Environment Story Project. It's been an honor (and also, very fun) to learn with this brilliant cohort of writers who cover the interplay between religion and the environment.

• I was featured on the Wellspring Mother Artist Project and chatted with with founders Jess & Mia about new motherhood, hunting for inspiration, and protecting space for our creative callings. Here's the conversation. “My daughter is changing before my eyes, and the weird fluidity/haze/time warp of new motherhood makes me believe that staying present and paying close attention is not just a nice idea, but actually urgent. All my best work is born from noticing and slowing down. So I hope becoming a mother is training me to look longer and closer at what's in front of me.”

Good things

• This playful audio/visual story about the soundscape of CDMX

• My favorite podcast is back in action, just in time for fall evening walks

• An astounding essay about risk and the quest to preserve sacred texts in Mali

If you have a friend who might enjoy reading along, will you pass on this email?
And thanks, as always, for being here.

Annie