We live on the leafiest street I've ever seen. The sycamores are knobby and enormous and meet overhead above the middle of the street. The sidewalk curves to accommodate their trunks.
I used to say the one thing Lancaster was lacking was natural beauty. The city is relatively flat and surrounded by lots of farmland. But how could I have missed what was right in front of me? This brilliant fall, walking the city streets with my kids, I have been floored by the trees. So many streets are lined with old, established beauties, which are now just past the peak of their blazing color.
We moved here in 1990, on my thirteenth birthday. Then I found the heavy, established quality that the trees seem to communicate downright oppressive. All those Millers and Weavers and Stolzfuses! Everyone is related, everyone stops to talk, communal memory stretches back and back and back. There was a story behind every corner, and I was not in any of them. This felt like a place where we would surely always be newcomers.
But the weight of this town, over years, ceased to be a burden and became instead an anchor. Twenty-five years later, I feel like myself here; I feel at home. I love it. The way my memory infuses its geography is extraordinary, like the canopy of a tall tree, layers upon layers of leafy branches through which the same ray of sunlight shines. I run with Beatrice in the jogger down the same street in School Lane Hills that I once ambled late, late at night with Melissa when we were fifteen and had snuck out of my house. I walked past our old house this morning after dropping the big kids at school, first remembering bringing newborn Frances here to visit Bob and Cathy (its current owners), then remembering raking leaves in the front yard with my family. I almost conjured my dad's shoulder to lean on as I passed.
Time and place make a tiny bit more sense here. Continuity offers a kind of peaceful entry into those mysteries. There is more space for the dead in a town like this.
The circumstances that brought us here in August were - are - the stuff of nightmares. I never could have guessed that cancer would bring us back to Lancaster. But I cannot imagine a better place to fall apart. People my children meet at birthday parties tell them about their grandfather. A teacher remembers me as a teenager. They discover that a friend's favorite babysitter was, at age two, my babysitting charge. So many want to reach out to all of us and care for us in this harrowing time. Gabriel asks: do you think you and Grandma know everyone in Lancaster??
Education, class, and a host of other things contributed to my sense, growing up, that to stay in the place one comes from is to fail. Growing up meant leaving. Ambitious, successful adults follow their own independent passions. Relationships should rank below career - especially for someone who identifies as a feminist (which I did and do) - right?
This now strikes me as a counterfeit, hollow notion of freedom and an impoverished idea of success. It's a set up; it denies the truth of our embodied, particular, interconnected selves. I first questioned it all when slammed with the vulnerability of parenthood - loving a tiny helpless baby more than myself. A tiny helpless baby does not need or even want a parent with a fancy job or big city real estate. A tiny baby wants a lot of people to love and care for her, and to support one another in loving and caring for her.
Just so a young family going through a catastrophic illness needs family and friends. We are known and loved here, which is what we need and want. I am watching the rings grow and grow on my family tree, newly aware of the ways in which its roots tunnel through a singular patch of rich soil. It's a desperately difficult part of the story, and I have awful days. But even then, the solidity of this tree holds me up.
