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Earlier this week, someone on Instagram shared this prophetic paragraph from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem —
“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
The words are a smarting on tender skin this week.
I had already been reflecting a lot on place, and permanence, and possession, and dispossession, but Didion’s words made me think about the ways in which the environment, and especially the weather that governs it, shapes our experience of home. Per Didion: what is your hometown’s “deepest image of itself”? And how does the environment and its weather affect the quality of life where you live?
I don’t mean to transfer this week’s tragedy into an intellectual exercise; I think these questions are as critical and non-trivial now as ever. How do we embrace the things we love about our hometowns in the imperfect now? How do we steel against their vicissitudes?
I have lived in Chicago, and I have lived in New York, and Charlottesville, and briefly Lyon, France, but home has always been Washington, D.C., and specific corners of it carry disproportionate weight in my casting of it. It’s like a caricaturist’s sketch: North Georgetown, Rock Creek Park, and now a specific corridor of Bethesda are the gargantuan nose, eyes, and ears in my drawing of the city. And if you have lived in any of those corridors, you know how densely green they are, how lush and overgrown, even in manicured Georgetown. On R St (where I lived in graduate school), and 35th St (where I attended high school), and Dent Place St (where I nannied), and 32nd Street (where I both interned in high school and lived after grad school), and 37th Street (where I attended grad school), it is as though brick is at constant war with ivy, and grass is lobbying an aggressive campaign to overtake the pavers, and trees want to extend through windows and walls. In the spring, cherry blossom petals lay like snow, obscuring the manmade. (Above: me at Dumbarton Oaks in summertime — in some ways, the apotheosis of Georgetown’s aesthetic.). And the Potomac glitters just at the feet of Georgetown, drawing the mind out to the Atlantic, and its impossible expanse. Meanwhile, Rock Creek Park, a stone’s throw from my childhood home, is not the demure greenspace of Central Park. It is thick and forested and, in its own way, wild. As a child, this gave me the impression of a porous line between home and greenspace. My Dad has always loved fly fishing, has always made time to visit with the woods and mountains, and sometimes I felt this odd because I already felt that our backyard was a kind of Walden, that Rock Creek Park down the street was a proper woodland, and that none of it was governed by anything but wildlife and clear pebbles of rain and the oppressive heat of August. In the summers, D.C. screams with cicadas. Every seven years, their hatches are Biblical, and this, too, made me feel my own proximity to the uncontrollable urges of the natural world. D.C., and the way it lays so obviously on the land, unable to obscure its wilds, has always given me the impression of my own smallness, the way we are forever neighboring with other, probably more important, universes.
If you are a journaling mood this Sunday, take a minute to write about your hometown, and to try to answer: what is your hometown’s deepest image of itself?
P.S. Georgetown is where many versions of myself run into each other.
P.P.S. New York was magical too.
P.P.P.S. More on D.C and its “parochial wild.”
Sunday Shopping Poetry.
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Rag&Bone saw how many of us are buying and loving their Sofie jeans (truly my most-worn pair ATM) and offered us a custom 20% off code sitewide with JEN20. // Alice Walk launched a new style of cotton sweater — I love her! (You might remember I am a huge fan of their weekender style — I own in two colors. So soft.) // Julia Amory is offering an extra 30% off sale items with code HAPPYNEWYEAR, including my favorite summer caftan (such an interesting color!), their fun Babe pants (I own in a brown pattern – so cute with a white tee and simple leather sandals), and elegant Jane dress (just throw on a big statement necklace and you’re done). // Wow – Rent the Runway is giving us 45% off any resale items over $60 with code SHOPMYXRTRJAN. I just mentioned this last week, but had no idea they have such a big resale collection. I bought this BA&SH coatigan and love her! Grab yours for 45% off! Also love this APC bag and this Alemais dress. // Have been using this volumizing shampoo and conditioner set for the past few weeks and love it. Sometimes I swap out the conditioner for the Lolavie formula, which I slightly prefer — it makes my hair so incredibly shiny and soft! — but the volumizing shampoo is great because I have fine, flat hair that’s never done an interesting thing in its life. // The brushed cashmere sweater, now on sale. Get in ivory! // This moisturizer came up from Magpies a few times in response to my post on the best winter moisturizers, and (as of time of writing this!), it’s 50% off. // Newly obsessed with French brand Soeur — these pants, this jacket!
My thoughts on my rural hometown are deep and varied but I have no particular hometown loyalty to there, but rather to my grandmother’s nearby small city. They had a downtown, and sidewalks, and green spaces in which I spent actual time. My town with its highway through the center didn’t have much to define it except its lakes (27!) but I lived in one of the few neighborhoods without a lake, or any central gathering area.
My son said to his uncle this week “This is my backyard, it right outside my house” as they were kicking a soccer ball around the paved shopping area nearby. It has palm trees and flowering jasmine, and a nearby duck pond. As good a backyard as any, I suppose! The city is his backyard. I long for a green space where he could spend time without my supervision, in the ways I rambled our woods as a small child. I’ve been trying to give him less time observed. I was actually reading an article about excessive FaceTime use in kids (9 year olds to teens who are on the program all day long with friends or significant others) and the ways in which it creates performance, a panopticon of sorts. The joy of Walden is that when you’re unobserved you may observe yourself, may choose what to bring into focus, may come to know yourself. I’m already thinking about digital autonomy/autonomy in the city for my small children, and how to balance my desire to observe and protect with my deep belief that some solitude, the ability to cultivate their attention and their own company is good for them.