Belonging

To place, to who we are.

Belonging to the many places we have lived in.

Places that have become part of our story, part of our lives. Immigrants over the years. Or emigrants. Places where fate takes us, sometimes we find it has been drawing us like a magnet ever since we were born, places where we want to go and are content to settle for a while, before moving on to another story. It may be a village of a few hundred souls, or it may be a larger town divided into smaller enclaves. The place exerts it right to bind you to it with invisible lines. The place says you belong to it. You are mine. I won’t let you go.

The story of one hill town: population at the last census 652. With its church, where a boy, now an elderly man, remembers helping paint the star-studded vault, its schoolhouse, its grocery, or perhaps two, its coffee bar where the men would gather to play cards when the field work was done. Its traditions. One of those villages where the parents, the grandparents, the great grandparents of those who live there now once lived. Their stories are part of the web that keeps their children there. Villages these children don’t want to leave.

A young man, after doing his stint as a soldier (before 2005 when obligatory military conscription was suspended), and eventually finding an occupation at home, might marry a girl from the family up the street. He had no intention of going elsewhere, he belonged to his town and it wouldn’t let him go. Would their children stay? Or would they belong to the new generation of those who left to find a better life and found themselves caught in the mesh of consumerism?

There was the young woman whose mother had not finished the fourth grade and wanted her daughter to have more. The grade school teacher found her a tutor who helped her achieve her university degree. Now this young woman is herself a teacher. Yet she cannot leave her mother who still lives where she herself grew up and the place has tightened its hold on her. Will never let her go.

What is it that keeps them there? Memories, yearly events. Stories of the past handed down from one generation to the next.

Much of this past has disappeared and lives only in memories. It may be a past of social changes, it may be a more intimate past of the stories of aunts and uncles. Where everyone was related to everyone else. Where life revolved around the three symbolic figures of the priest, the doctor, and the schoolteacher. The priest might be the one who had given homes and occupations to abandoned dysfunctional young men, a visit to the doctor was also an occasion to unburden one’s troubles and ask for advice, as he administered to pains of all sorts, the schoolteacher prepared the coming generation and helped those who wanted to improve their lives to learn how to escape a life of social and material impoverishment.There might also be an association of nuns or priests who provided aid to the sick and had an establishment where those who had nowhere else to go could be taken care of. Centuries earlier the charitable religious associations had seen to that and this seemed to be their continuation.

Memories included how things were done once upon a time and times of war and times of peace and times of want or dearth. Wheat, turned into flour for bread and pasta, the lifeline of the peasant, was carefully kept track of to be sure it would last till the next harvest. It was still a sharecropper’s culture where going to market in the city meant a ten-mile walk into town where the owner’s share would be consigned before what remained might be bartered for some other necessity. Natural events or disasters such as earthquakes, when the towns people would sleep out on the road, floods devastating the crops, hurricanes, fire raging through the fields, were always lying in wait. Occupying soldiers might pass through and the sides of cured ham would be hidden in the olive tree. It was a community and the members helped each other in need. Olives would be picked together, and the grapes, when those who were participating for the first time would have their face washed in a handful of squashed sweet grapes. Once upon a time after the grapes were picked, the young people would take turns rolling up their trousers or skirts to stomp them and make wine for the household. Threshing too was a communal labor and was followed by a banquet.

It was the people the town kept hold of. Everyone was related to everyone else. There were the three brothers, two of whom married two sisters. When the war was over their mother had carried the oldest boy, still an infant, down from the north, catching rides here and there, the last of which with a load of coal and they arrived in anything but pristine condition. There was the farmer’s wife who one day left her children and husband and upped and ran away with a fireman. They say she wasn’t all that much to look at either. Sometimes it was a matter of gossip when what had happened was frowned upon by society and was hushed up. As in any town there were oddballs and misfits, but they were accepted by the community. People knew each other, knew each other’s stories. Helped each other. But gradually those who knew disappeared, their stories were no longer handed down or became myth, like that of the two who competed with who could eat more, weighing themselves before and after a banquet.

There were weddings and baptisms and funerals. Rejoicing and mourning. The cycle of life was celebrated and the place reached out its tentacles and wrapped them around its children. They belonged to the place and it would not let them go.

The past is part of the present. Yet how can one ignore the here and now where many people have only memories of what was once their home and so many of those they knew and who made up their community have disappeared. They have only memories of place and people. My heart goes out to them. The places no longer exist as they knew or remember them. The people as they were will remain always as they were. A child, an elder. A loved one.

A place exists as it was yesterday before destruction set in. The children they loved will never grow up. Memories however still persist. All life is but a memory.