Much ado on the mountain, lately. The pandemic, and our own little personal response to it, has panned out this last half a year, taking us on a long, steady, slow though not so smooth ride.
But now, for my wife, the baby and I, in our own little personal lives, the pandemic takes a sudden new course. Instead of staying at home, limiting social contact, thinking of our every interaction with a mechanic or grocery clerk, or wait-time inside a doctor's office, as racking up "exposure" points for that day, we are now shooting off into the sunset: we're moving. Across the whole damn country.
We're apparently not alone.
Lots of people are moving; the moving company guy preparing an estimate for me said they're busier than ever. People don't want to be where they are anymore. The pandemic's seeped in. People know it's here for the long haul, now, so to speak.
It's funny how a place where you've laid your head for countless nights can suddenly feel like it's not your own anymore.
For us, here on the mountain, this tight half acre or so squeezed in between, and under, the trees, has been home. It's where we're still spending most of our time, these days. But it soon won't be ours anymore; in fact, never technically was since we've been renting the place. Yet it's only been us, here—tending the garden, mowing the lawn, cleaning up after the trees, watching one fall and another raise up; planting, sowing and ripping out; digging, cutting and laying down; and all of the many other chores about any stretch of land which grants the irrefutable sense that this place, this piece of property, this land is yours, because you know it in your back and spine, in your hands and arms, in your legs and feet because you've paced the lay of it again and again and again over the years.
But what's in ownership?
Even a deed, or title, or contract cannot give you anymore than a legal say-so over a piece of earth, and, as lawyers say in their circles, your right to swing your fist stretches only so far as the end of my nose. So with land. Your right to your property stretches only as far as you do nothing with or on your land which harms your neighbor, or the environment, or those living downhill. All land is connected. And what is perhaps yours now will not be yours forever.
Not even dynasties can withstand the age of the earth.
The electric company made this point abundantly clear to me. They came by about two or three weeks ago and flashed their buzz saw on the end of a cherry picker and made a straight and level wall out of the crowns of mulberry, redbud, sassafras, and anything else with the bad luck of having grown roots and a bough and few sticks of branches under a power line. The electric company came in and cleared a swath out of the woods, completely mowing down the screen of greenery around the one side of our house, leaving us feeling more or less exposed, then they left only shot-off hunks of wood and debris in their wake. They even dismembered the locust tree in our front yard and left the pieces of it lying for me to clean up (what pieces I could move on my own anyways, half the trunk is still laying there).
It's like you don't have a say when it comes to trees and electric lines, even if they're your own trees, not when the electric company has say.
It's funny how with a snap of the fingers a piece of property just goes out of your control, whether by animal—such as with pests like moles that can be impossible to get rid of once they've settled in, or by weather—as with the three or so super-cells in this area that, in just the last four years, have ruined our new vegetable sprouts and toppled more than one tree, or by the electric company...
...and suddenly it's not your own anymore. Whatever mark you've left on it will be fleeting and impermanent, Mother Nature, at least, will see to that, if man does not, and there's the feeling that this is perhaps closest to the truth than any sense of ownership you can ever possess, that this is perhaps the way all of humanity should think of ourselves on this earth.
Even the idea of property is a kind of made-up term that, in the long geological and astronomical scheme of things, doesn't really mean a goddamn thing. So, should we ever feel nostalgic or sorrowful or even a tidbit sad for leaving a place?
Sure, it's what we do. Because, at least for the blink of an eye, it was ours, once. In a way.
And that's all from the mountain, this perhaps week.