The Place Where You Live

“Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.” —Rebecca Solnit

Once upon a time, Orion published a regular department called The Place Where You Live. Though the department was discontinued in 2003, we’ve been asked about its fate ever since—and reminded by readers of how important it was to them.

So we’re bringing it back. This is a space for you to exercise your sixth sense and tell us about your place. What connects you to it? What history does it hold for you? What are your hopes and fears for it? What do you do to protect it, or prepare it for the future, or make it better?

Your contribution can take the form of:
* a short essay or story. Please, no more 350 words – submissions longer than 350 words cannot be considered.
* a photograph.
* a painting, drawing, or hand-made map.

All submissions will appear on the Place Where You Live section of the Orion web site, which will launch in May. Upon the launch of the Place Where You Live web page readers will also be able to submit audio, video, and slideshow formats.

A few of the contributions we receive will appear in the print edition of Orion. Place Where You Live will be published in every issue of Orion (as well as online), so submissions will be considered for the print magazine on a rolling basis.

To submit e-mail your submission to place@orionmagazine.org.

Examples from back issues of Orion

Mobile, Alabama
—Carol Estelle Wheeler
My place is the homestead of my origins—a warm and modest house built by my parents in the first year of their marriage on land that had been a pecan orchard. One orchard tree was left, which still shades the entrance to the house and yields sweet, rich nuts ad libitum. But it is the back yard that is really my place, where I played as a child—sucking bits of juice from honeysuckle, inhaling the sweet bush along the back fence whose name I can never remember, marking the seasons by lush azaleas, which encircle most of the yard’s edge and the looming holly bush, startling in its red and green when the weather has been right—feeling secure that my mother was inside the house, catching her smile at the back window in the midst of my play. But it is the wild wisteria and the yellow running roses at the south gate that most define my place. The roses are more sparse now and the wisteria trunk so gnarled at its base that one wonders how it can continue to produce the soft and mysterious profusion of pale purple each spring. It has been many years since I lived there, but it is indeed the place out of which I live.

South of St. Peter, Minnesota
—Nancy Sather
Two decades I’ve driven this road, enjoyed the way it echoes the lay of the land. In a time of linear gridways, this road has escaped forced separation from the curve of the hill and meander of the river. All its latent beauty comes alive at night, when steel utility buildings and monoculture patches of brown brome are overshadowed by the silhouettes of the hills bumping the constellations as I pass.

Away from the sprawling aura of urban light, the stars gleam with a forgotten brightness. Polaris holds steady off the dipper, anchoring a familiar sky. There is a certain utility in a star that has guided our forbears across stormy seas, to new hunting grounds, new homes. That star must have offered comfort to the driven on the Trail of Tears, hope to the hidden on the Underground Railroad. Driving at this leisurely pace, there’s time to check the sky, catch a fix on north. What if needed to know?

The winding trace of the road is an excuse to go slowly, to take in the eyes of the deer hounded by coyote, the sparkle of rodent eyes vanishing under the silent descent of the owl. Beyond a blue horse-pasture barn lights burn late. The gaping mouth of a haymeadow gleams against the elevator lugging moonlit bales skyward. Meandering slowly through the unfolding life of this place gives the mind a breath of space. Night driving is a good pause from the hectic race, an opportunity to get off the fast track.
But not for long!

They are upgrading the road, finding the only possible way to lay long strips of straightness in a crooked land. When they are done it will have a median strip. Guardrails will protect us from the view of raccoons stealing into the corn. It will be posted at sixty-five. We will need to hurtle along just to keep with the pace, pushed from behind, locking our cruise control on seventy. Propelled by speed, we will need to focus more and more on the tunnel of night before us, searching for safety amidst the myriad lights.

We will be oblivious to hills and river and trees, the black and blue play of the moon on the Holstein’s back, and the night work of putting up hay. Propelled only “forward” and increasing speed we will lose our bearings until we no longer know how to trace the dipper to Polaris.