In my novel Nearly Canaan, Joshua and Jaya settle into a place unlike anything they would have imagined. It’s desert, for one thing, where nearly everything has to be irrigated, for another. Quite simply, it’s a lot like Yakima, in the middle of Washington state and an agricultural mecca.
Besides the well-known crops of apples, hops, and grapes, let’s consider:
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Not necessarily in that order.
Was anyone else left wanting to tell the true believers:
Just drink the kool-aid, will you …
I’ve lived here for 20 years now, and worshiped here for another dozen.
Dover is the seventh oldest permanent settlement in the U.S. – and the oldest in New Hampshire. We’re preparing for its 400th anniversary in 2023. Did I mention I love history? We’re surrounded by it.
We’re also close to the ocean in one direction and mountains in the other.
Here are ten more things I appreciate.
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What do you treasure about the place where you live?
When we have foreign guests staying with us, I have to watch is the need to speak slower and more distinctly. (Well, that’s obviously on hold during the Covid outbreak, though we have heard from one back in China assuring us she’s fine.) The exchanges can start to sound comical, even before I face the difficult challenge of using smaller words. Me? Smaller words? Look, we have more than 200,000 in the English language for a reason!
You can imagine our situation when they’re Chinese students here for a month or so as they volunteer at ono-profits internships. Somehow, shorter visits just don’t seem to rise to the more complex communications.
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My daily Spanish lessons raise the translation issues from an opposite direction, but I think I’ve crossed an important threshold there, one that goes beyond vocabulary.
Have you noticed how a spoken language becomes a musical line rather than individual words? My wife remembers her shock learning that “come on” was two words, not one, as in “cumon.”
When the Duolingo voice tells me, “Type what you hear,” I know to write what I’m supposed to hear rather than what I actually encounter at fast speed.
You could say that in common usage our sentences lose all of the spaces between words. In Spanish I sometimes notice this more as a rhythm across where a word should be between two other words rather than hearing that word or even a letter itself.
Somethinglikethispoorexample.
Rather. Than. Some. Thing. Like. This.
I’m also noticing that the endings of some words are vanishing, as they do in so much French, especially a final “s.”
Must happen in English, too, ‘cept we just take it for granted and naturally fill in the meaning.
Now, as for all of those hearing-aid solicitations I keep getting in the mail? I doubt they’d help my Spanish any.
What do you have to say here? (Please type slowly and distinctly.)
I’ve had to learn the hard way that a word can mean something quite dissimilar for two people. Sometimes it’s based on assumptions or misunderstandings. Sometimes, on deliberate deception.
Either way, one person can be deeply injured by the outcome.
Take “I love you” as an example.
A used car is in “perfect condition.”
“I’ll be right there.”
In the hippie era, we had a raft of phrases that glossed over differences – “Hey, I’m cool with that,” “Don’t hassle me,” “I dig,” “Chill out.” Meaning?
It comes up especially with “God” or even “peace.”
There are plenty of other examples, some of them keeping lawyers in business.
What’s one from your own experience?
Wow, I really have been all over the map in getting to here. That’s what’s stirred up as I look at the range of experiences reflected in my novels and poetry as well as here at the Barn. That ‘scape has covered a childhood in the Midwest, college in a Big Ten school, an inner city ghetto during my hippie years and then the farms that followed, as well as desert and mountains, more Midwest and then Baltimore, along with my first marriage and some wild romances, and finally New England and my little city farm here.
Sometimes I wind up feeling dizzy. Those pins and needles are all over the place.
Are you one of the lucky ones who got to stay put?
It’s like we’re living with no destination. We can go out for a walk but can’t stop casually at the store or the library or café. Maybe wave to neighbors through a window.
To call what we’re doing “monastic” misses the mark. After all, monks live in communities, working and praying together. And being single, as he is, still doesn’t mean monkish.
We can’t hug or even touch anybody outside of our household, not if we’re maintaining quarantine.
Humans are social animals, after all.
At the moment, the one thing that makes sense doing is prayer.
