Know your land, know your people
From whence do you come?
Picture me, almost 20 years ago, on a terrible, fated beach vacation with my first college boyfriend. (I’ll tell you the story another time; it’s lurid, fantastic, heart-rending.)
He took me to visit his high school swim coach, who was also holidaying there, and we met the matriarch of this swim coach’s family. She was the highlight of the trip.
This genteel elderly woman received us on the screened-in porch, where she was sitting in a rocking chair with her sweet tea. We went to pay our respects, and she looked us up and down. She stared at me for a while, and after I gave my name, she asked me just one thing:
“And who are your people?”
I’ll always remember her question. She had that high lilting Carolina accent that can sound almost British in a sentence ending. I looked at her regal face and had no idea what to say. What she was asking was, Girl, where are you FROM?
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future… Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”
— Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots” (1943)
Recognition and roots
Shortly after I married (my second college boyfriend), I told my grandmother that we’d be moving to Charlottesville.
Her eyes lit up. “Oh, honey,” she breathed. “It’s God’s country out there. You’ll love it like I did.”
My grandmother, Lucy, had a tumultuous childhood. Her father died when she was 3, leaving her mother, Clarice, to raise her and her three siblings on a small teacher’s salary. To make ends meet, Clarice sent Lucy and her brother off to be raised by their Aunt Mabel and Uncle Teap on a small farm outside of Amherst, Virginia, about an hour south of Charlottesville.
Even though I only visited the farm once in my lifetime, it holds a special place in our family lore. To my grandmother, it was her true home, the site of her earliest and most deeply held memories.
We took a pilgrimage to the farm with my grandmother when I was probably 7 or 8, and I remember it well. I remember the small rolling hills and the grove of trees by the red-roofed house. I remember sitting on gapped floorboards playing Uno with my second-cousins-once-removed. I remember, after lunch there, my aunt yanking out my loose tooth, to my horror, saying she was tired of watching me move it around in my gums during lunch.
But the farm was lovely and hospitable. We walked with the distant cousins get eggs from the coop. We hopped fences and wandered the well-worn paths through the fields. We ate sandwiches and didn’t speak much to each other but wandered companionably across the land.
It’s a weird thing to say about a place you’ve only visited once, but I don’t think any land is more beautiful than this.
Something deep in my body, something I’m not sure how to name, recognizes that landscape. And I felt this when I saw Charlottesville and its surrounding countryside for the first time. Lucy was right: It does feel like God’s country. I felt like I was supposed to be there.
Almost sixteen years later, we’re still in Charlottesville, which was not our original intention. We thought we’d move back to North Carolina eventually, after Guion finished grad school. But this place, with all of its flaws, kept us here, with its beautiful people and beautiful land. We put down roots.
Carry the land with you
Roots are not easily severed. Even if you live far away from your birthplace, you’re never that far away. Our bodies are inextricable from our homelands.
Even if you move across the country, even if you’re taken far from where you were born, your homeland goes with you.
This is both spiritually and physically true. In a spiritual sense, we remember the land as if it were a part of us, merged with our actual bodies. Our earliest memories are tied to the place we were raised. George Eliot expresses this beautifully in Daniel Deronda:
“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.”
Eliot implies that our active affection for our native land isn’t generated by emotions but something even deeper and more instinctive: a sweet habit of the blood.
The connection is visceral. With regard to our physical tie to the land, forensic investigators discovered that isotopes in human hair can provide information about many things: the person’s age, sex, race, body mass, and health—but most interestingly—their region of origin.1 Yes: No matter where else you go or live, your hair keeps a record of where you were born. This is insane and beautiful.
I love encountering people who are vocal about carrying the land with them always. I think of Guion growing up in the ancient pine savannas of the Carolinas, harboring deep knowledge of pine trees, pinecones, needles, and sap; watching controlled burns; feeling most at home in what to me looks like a monotonous forest. I think of my father’s unambiguous love for the dense cornfields of rural Indiana. I think of Alex, my brother-in-law and old friend, leaving the beating heart of the Machine (Washington, D.C.) to move his family back to his island homeland, the Graveyard of the Atlantic, to raise his son as the Prince of Hatteras among his oceanic kinfolk.
It is good to be from somewhere. You carry that place with you always.
I am grateful I only moved once in my childhood (and even then, just 25 minutes away). Even though I’m not especially sentimental about Charlotte, I have a lot of pride in and affection for my home state. My maternal people are North Carolinian for many generations. I’ll always side with North Carolina in any regional scuffle. Driving through rural North Carolina farmland will always feel like a drive homeward.
Don’t let the city get to you
All of this romantic language about the land can get lost on us city folk.
Cities make us all dependents and separate us from the land as much as possible. You could live in an American metropolis and never see soil once. Cities encourage belief in the pervasive modern lie that “nature” is something separate, something you go see in a confined park or on a hike miles outside of the cityscape.
Cities distort our understanding of the earth. They can choke the love of the land out of us.
They’re not, at our current pace, sustainable:
“75 percent of worldwide energy use is in cities, and energy demand is outstripping population growth as those cities expand. That energy has to be mined around the globe and imported to the urban centres, with all of the knock-on effects on people and the rest of nature. As those centres continue to grow, so does urban poverty: three billion people could be living in slums by 2050. Globally, an area larger than Britain will be converted to cityscape between 2000 and 2030, and that in turn will increase everything from carbon emissions to pressure on vulnerable species and habitats.”2
But what are we to do? I, like most people on the planet, live in a city (albeit a small one, with about 46,000 residents).
I like reading the agrarian prophets, but because I live in a small city, I often believe that their calls to know and love the land don’t apply to me. I don’t have a homestead. I have a modest fenced-in backyard near my city’s center.
What does this rhetoric about knowing and loving the land mean for city residents? How should we raise our urban or suburban children? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and have a few meager ideas.
How to love the land when you live in a city
Know who lived there before you. Go as far back as you can. Find the prior residents of your house; research the history of your neighborhood; learn about the First Nations in your area. We live in a historic neighborhood that housed textile mill workers for a century. And the particular plot of land we live on was a golf course in the 1920s, which explains some of the weird things we find buried in the ground and the towering Norway spruce in our backyard, a curious outlier among the rest of the neighborhood’s trees.
Get your hands in the soil, however you can. Garden. If you don’t have a little plot of land, adopt one nearby (e.g., community gardens, parks, beg a neighbor).
Gain intimacy with the local flora and fauna. Know the names of the birds who visit your yard. Be able to name every tree you can see out your bedroom window. Refer to the flowers and insects by name and teach them to your children. Be specific.
Find out what the city is doing (or wants to do) with your neighborhood. Brush up on zoning. Try to understand what City Council is going on about (I am bad at this).
Meet your neighbors. Ask for their phone numbers. Offer and ask for help. Learn about how long they’ve lived there and what they want for (and from) the neighborhood.
Walk. Running, biking, and driving aren’t the best ways to get to know the land. You have to go slow, at a human pace. The pace of a toddler.
As Saint Wendell says, “It all turns on affection.” To love the land invites a radical reorientation toward our bodies and our neighbors, especially for us city folk. We’re not exempt from this invitation.
No matter where we live, no matter how much concrete exists outside our windows, existing in such studied ignorance of the land feels like a crime. Knowing the land on which we live is a vital act of resistance in 2026. The land reminds us that we have bodies situated in a particular place, on particular soil with a particular history. (How wild that we need that reminder!) It invites us into an embodied experience of being human, one that seems daily to be slipping out of our grasp.
Currently reading
Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag
The Information Desk, Robyn Schiff
Victory, Joseph Conrad
“Using Isotopes in Human Hair to Reveal Personal Characteristics for Forensic Investigations,” National Institute of Justice (22 April 2018): https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/using-isotopes-human-hair-reveal-personal-characteristics-forensic-investigations
Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth
I had an overwhelming moment of “roots gratitude”recently when driving on Cameron Avenue and just being so thankful for having grown up in Chapel Hill. A flood of memories of being on that campus with my dad and a sense of true connection.