Place

"I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is." Narrator, True Stories

We've been busy noticing the details of this place. There is so much to see that we haven't seen before. So much that provides "scope for the imagination." So much to file away for when it all becomes commonplace and ordinary.

There's a house on the main street through town. The lawn is high and strewn with skeletal remains of lawn furniture of all sort. There, in a plastic lawn chair, during most of the daylight hours, sits a somewhat plump older woman with skin the color of milk chocolate and hair that looks a bit like it was permanently frozen into place by a Van de Graaff generator. She sits, unmoving, clutching a well-loved baby doll, once the color of peach flesh, swathed in the tattered remnants of a dress.

There's a pond not quite in and not quite out of city limits. Most of the time it lies still and unmolested. But if you happen by at the right time in the relative cool of the evening, you may find two barefooted figures seated atop overturned plastic buckets, dangling bits of bait into the murky water from their simple fishing poles.

There's a field outside of town to the south that has transformed in a matter of weeks from rows of nondescript small, leafy plants to a jungle of large bushes of yellow-green rippled tobacco. Down the road a piece is a small swamp that clearly used to be a patch of forest. Now all that remains are small, dark stumps of trees, peering out of the water as if to mark their own graves for anyone who cares to remember.

Throughout town, and scattered along the road to and from, there are dozens of structures, most of them obscured by a profusion of trees and kudzu vines, that clearly used to be someone's home. Sometimes the windows are boarded. Sometimes a weather-beaten official notice flaps on the rakishly-hanging door. Sometimes a hand-written "For Sale" sign molders on what was the lawn. Almost always you can see traces -- from the sagging roof and tumble-down outbuildings to the vine-draped car frames and silent farm equipment -- of the lives lived there before the place was given up to the elements.

There's a plot of land downtown that at first glance is just a patchy lawn, perhaps a public space. But if you walk by and look more carefully, you can make out, through the grass, the outlines of a structure that was almost certainly a house. A rusted-through pole stands sentinel in a distant part of the yard, now bereft of backboard and hoop. A string of large brown Ts lean, as if they would prefer to just take a nap in the grass, still tenuously connected by lengths of clothesline. Nearby lies the battered wood and brick pump house, and if you look carefully at the ground beside it, you can make out ruddy chunks of masonry brick sticking up through the grass. The house and its occupants are gone, hints of their lives remain.

In the neighborhoods surrounding NC State there are more used book and record stores than anything else besides eateries. The Reader's Corner stands out from the pack. The entire storefront is lined with shelves. And every shelf is lined with books. Every book is 10 or 25 cents, and there is a "honor" slot in the door. So, if you get a hankering to find something new-to-you to read at 3 am, you can walk or drive up and grab a book, as often as not bearing the name of a previous reader in faded ink inside the front cover, leaving only pocket change behind.

There is little need here to separate the new from the old. Life goes on, and what is no longer needed is abandoned. Nobody comes through with bulldozers and restores order where it is lost until commercial interests come in with their master-planned communities and revitalized ideals. Even then, the past isn't obliterated -- it is just slowly asked to give way to the new, acre by acre, and somehow the up-to-date coexists with the irrelevant. The new is built in the shadow of the old, and much of the old remains... a tangible memory of what was. I find it all comforting, somehow. Place is more than architecture and nature. It is our collective experience in the space, and it bears the imprint of otherwise forgettable lives.