Marietta | senseofplace

P L A C E

I go deep, not wide.

I am a loyal person.

Today marks 49 years of marriage to a man

Who ten years ago slipped away into alcoholism.

I have stayed the course.

Stayed.

This is me. Curious but lazy, too.

Status quo. Way to go.

I’m not going anywhere.

First of all, I’m a dirt girl.

Love my hands in the soil.

Love sitting on ground,

Cold, hard ground or warm, soft beach sand.

But ground.

I am grounded.

I’m thinking about why I connect with this place.

Is it the actual land? Or the people, too?

When did it start? How old was I?

I remember the beach at the end of Neel Road.

The lake by the Glutton Club. The steep hill to walk

Up and down at Pleasant Lake. The walk-about I took when I was

Less than 3 years old from our Neel Road house and my frantic mother

Coming to find me walking along Route 28.

I’ll bet that’s when she first realized I have

A will of my own, an inclination to go off by myself, that curiousity thing.

She never said anything about that, but I think she might have been

The same way.

She always told us about where she came from, Haverhill.

Made it sound like a wonderful place. She modeled for me

the idea of having a connection to where you come from.

Because we lived in a resort, Cape Cod, most people we met came from someplace else. Add into that our relationships to the local people we knew, included knowing what part of the Cape or what part of town they came from, and if my mother had had them as pupils in school and what their maiden name was.

My mother was emphatic that we lived in Harwich Pot. Her accent elided most “r” sounds. When I moved to Harwich Center in 1972, I felt a little bit like I let her down, not moving to Harwich Pot. We had looked at a house on Crosby Lane, Brewster and a house in Barnstable Village, even considered Vermont. But somehow those locations weren’t good enough. In hindsight, they all were superior real estate values.

We moved to Harwich Center. In all seriousness, my father asked me why I would ever move to Vermont because I would never be considered a native of there.

This is the man who told me it is a privilege to pay taxes. He believed this. He even preached “a place for everything and everything in its place.” He told me one should be so good at this that one could find things in the dark. He was talking about his tools. But I think I translated that into me being in a place I belong. Here.

Marietta Nilson 3/31/15