Circling Home

Epilogue: Is

As if it were a scene made up by the mind, That is not mine, but is a made place. robert duncan,“Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” epilogue Is The circle tightens as Fred and I drive the final three blocks to our house on Tempo Court. What have I gained from circling out and back through this tiny scrap of southern landscape? I have found some assurance that I’ve finally settled, but the basic trappings of settlement—marriage, family, home—are not enough. Even Elijah Clarke, our first pioneer, would have understood those terms. A few years after building his cabin on the Pacolet, Clarke moved on to the wilder frontier. Already by 1775 the woods and river bottoms I love were not wild enough for him. He traveled down the Old Georgia Road into what was still Indian country. I want some deeper understanding of what’s at stake now in the valley of Lawson’s Fork. There are no frontiers Clarke would recognize out my backdoor. I have traded the freedom of frontiers for what Frank Lloyd Wright calls “organic simplicity,” the integration of the necessary functions of a modern human life with natural beauty. 199 Betsy and I have tried to find that simplicity. We’ve worked to make our house part of a larger whole reflected in the woods and water around us. Using Wright as a mentor, we built our unusual house to mimic the colors and arrangements we saw in this piedmont landscape. We embraced what Wright called “freedom of floor space” through our open floor plan. We try to live lightly, reducing what’s now known as a “carbon footprint” by a dozen choices for better energy use. Often we’re reminded of it by something as simple as light through the south-facing windows or rain falling on our tin roof. “Living within a house wherein everything is genuine and harmonious,” Wright wrote, “a new sense of freedom gives one a new sense of life.” When Fred turns onto Tempo Court I can see the result of all our reflection and planning. Our house is hard to see at the end of the cul-de-sac. With its granite gray wall, tan hues, and reflecting glass it blends into the summer woods that close in around it. Only the driveway and the mailbox announce that someone’s home is deep in the trees. Fred pulls in the driveway and remembers before he leaves that he’s promised he’ll fix my brush mower. The belt slips when I’m cutting in heavy grass, and our paths down to the creek are overgrown. He asks me if I’ve got a pair of “channellock pliers,” and we both marvel at the names of things, sometimes perfect little poems that grab you and hold on like the pliers themselves. He knows exactly what to do with the pliers: unloosens four bolts, pulls the belt back into place, tightens them back down, and it’s ready to go. A real fix-it guy. Fred says he’s got a lunch appointment with his daughter and says goodbye. After he leaves, I crank up the big roaring mower and head it down the hill. I cut the edges of the path leading out of our backyard down to the creek. Once down on the trail I cut a four-foot swath thirty yards in either direction. With that finished, I head the machine back up the hill. I’ll do the rest later. 200 ° Epilogue The irony of my big gas-burning trail mower isn’t lost on me. I think of our trails as sort of “linear lawns” and know I probably spend as much time mowing them as my neighbors do their yards. My taste is trails and theirs lawns. A long mile along the road to settlement is making peace with other people’s taste. I need to keep the trails cut because the creek is really why we are out here on the edge of the suburbs. The real bull’seye of my circle is not the house. It’s down where the water flows. That eternal flow is what sustains my attention through drought and flood. They used to believe that all rivers flowed from the center of the earth, but now we know that’s not true. Rivers are...