Friday, January 13, 2023

Slow Change is a Natural Wonder

 

You’ve invited some friends to visit Round Top over the holidays. They haven’t been here in a while. Ten or twenty years, maybe. Well before anyone thought of the word “Roundtopolis.” (How about that word? We’ve always needed a name, I think, for the area that spreads out around the town. This word does so many things—evokes Superman, drips with irony, fits nicely into hype of all kinds).

But I digress.

Your friends, arriving at the square—pausing at the surprising, but welcome stoplight—will they recognize Round Top? Will they even be able to see it after dark in the glare of a thousand tiny white lights wrapping every tree? (Again, I digress.)

The bones of the town remain, of course. Fine, authentic bones. Von Minden Store, for one. (Oh, you don’t remember that? You don’t remember when Betty Schatte held court over beer drinkers meeting to tell stories and solve the problems of the day? It’s now Popi Burger.)

And Klumps—the small store where realtors now answer phones, and the larger restaurant, once an area anchor with plate lunches and Saturday BBQ. (It's now Mandito’s.)

The buildings—those bones I mention—have rarely looked better, I think.

The Stone Cellar, named for its location in what is now Lulu’s, has been transformed into wood and expanded under new ownership.

Henkel Square, formerly a greensward with exceptional live oaks and the town’s earliest buildings (rarely visited), now offers popular shops and gathering places clustered around a parking lot. Plus, next door to the square’s bottle shop, a relatively new Episcopal congregation brings life to the old Haw Creek Church. Take your dog along (at least some of the time).

Your friends will notice another change, too. The sprouting of spec houses and subdivisions.

All these changes sing to the tune of fashion and the desire of city folks to hang onto urban conveniences when they come to the country. It’s the reason “farm kitchens” in new upscale “ranch” houses have granite counters and dishwashers and a toilet for every bed.

An earlier generation of Houstonians coming here wanted contrast with urban life. In cities, the wildest creature one encounters is often a flying roach or earth-bound rat nosing around the garbage can.

Well, we have squirrels and field mice around our country place, but we aren’t seeing so many shy creatures we once glimpsed with awe. Many fewer rabbits, birds, coyotes, deer, possums, bobcats. We once knew where the jackrabbit lived on our road, and where we were likely to spot the roadrunner. And in the evening, choruses of barred owls vied with the goblin sounds of coyotes, the wildest sound of all.

No longer, though.

So why do we keep coming when the activity of developers displaces much of the reason for being here as fast as it can?

We come to touch reality, I think. To appreciate the wonder of being alive, often blurred by the distraction of cities. We come for what has been called “the rhythm of the land.” The visible, tangible life of leaves. The slow coloring of native grasses. The waves of distant sound and nearby rustling that signal migratory birds. Many fewer of those, now, too.

Here, on a porch in the woods, we feel ourselves at home in the slow, inexorable seasonal roll of nature. We make friends with ourselves as human beings and we feel grounded.

Whether we know it or not, that’s what we long for. Not the Viking Range or Insinkerator. Not the extended shopping mall that some of our pastures have become.

The First Blessing


Rushing about in preparation for the holidays, I’ve been thinking about reasons to be thankful. There are so many—and no, this will not be the list of them we occasionally see this time of year.

I do, however, want to point out the first and best of reasons: We are alive, following years of upheaval. Those of us who lost loved ones during the pandemic isolation time may find our own survival to this date somewhat miraculous, in fact.

I’ve had a stark reminder of this situation over the past week. My otherwise healthy cousin in Seattle died of circulatory complications from Covid, and my son has the virus right now, in Manhattan. So does his wife. Three friends who went to Europe on dream trips returned with it, and two have recovered.

The pandemic intensified our understanding of human vulnerability to forces we cannot see. Viruses, for example. Some of those forces move so slowly we don’t notice them until much damage has occurred. I’m thinking here of the attrition experienced by our woods and wildlife since LH wrote in Texas Chronicles about what it was like to be here alone in 1986—surrounded by wild creatures and dense foliage.

We do recognize drouth, and we pray for rain. Even the least traditionally religious among us asks the Universe for mercy in a variety of troubling situations.

This may be the characteristic most defining of human nature. We ask for help. We give thanks for blessings.

Each time we do it we confirm our certainty of the tiny, fragile position we represent in the vastness of space. A terrifying thought, unless we believe there’s a guiding Force to supplicate.

All this is why I think of Thanksgiving as our most ecumenically religious American holiday. Everyone who gives thanks on that day participates in a religious act. Because thanking requires a recipient.

Think of the holiday tables where we’re asked to say what we’re thankful for.

Who are we thanking? (And it’s not just the cook or the person who paid for the food.)

The experience isn’t really confined to one day, either.

Even the most secular of our households find their inhabitants expressing thanks or gratitude for various blessings during the year. (There I go again. Hard to talk about it without using religious terms.)

But blessings do feel as though they fall from a great Magnanimity that surrounds us, listening, caring, providing comfort. We may want to think we have done something to encourage those good things, but have we? Perhaps. But do we diminish them by treating them as a transaction? Aren’t blessings most deeply a gift for which to be thankful?

I’ve had many reasons to give thanks this year, aside from the matter of survival I mentioned earlier. My fiction writing has begun to gain recognition, opening the doors of a fairly reclusive life to possibilities of broader connection. Less loneliness, perhaps.

The process of grieving the loss of my husband showers me with reasons. I give thanks for him, for his forbearance with me, for his love. Perspective on our life together is like a peony or other many-petaled flower slowly unfolding from bud to full-blown. It takes time to appreciate all the stages, both while they’re going on, as well as later.

And time, itself—which is life, after all—is maybe the fundamental thing to give thanks for. The first of our many blessings. 

It's our nature to center certain emotions on recurring calendar dates, but being thankful is one we can hold close all year.