From one vantage out of our bedroom window is the Dorset Cereal Factory, a handsome red brick building which engenders the only traffic on our street--Peverell Avenue East--that I’m aware of. Last night walking home after visiting the Holy Trinity Catholic church 
on the High Street 
and peeking into the rectory garden 
(if “rectories” are what they’re called in Catholic parishes), I noticed something giving me strong waves of joy and nostalgia--the smell of the air. John thought it might be the cereal factory, and it is a sort of a breakfast smell. I wonder what the yellow fields are across from our window. I don’t think it’s strictly wheat--it doesn’t smell like my dad’s farm. Maybe it’s just the scent of grass hay. Whatever plant or combination of plants it is (and I noticed it on the other side of Dorchester too, so I don’t think it’s just the cereal factory), it is very evocative--maybe even more so before I noticed it.
I was thinking too, how for an early bookworm like me, England is Storybook Land. The second-hand book sale in the church hall reminded me of it. The hedgerows and little fields, the narrow streets of the village,
the market, 
the Church, 
the broad-faced farm woman in a skirt and wellies (even her tarty daughter with pink hair and a lip piercing), are all denizens of that land. It’s magical because I met it first in a book. The Pevinses England is just as fantastical to me as Narnia is. Even grimy, busy London is magic, from Oliver Twist to Sherlock Holmes to Mrs. Dalloway to Peter Wimsey to Rumpole to Inspector Dalgliesh. Who knows who I’ll run into next week in Baker Street or St. James Park or the Old Bailey or Whitechapel Road or Kensington SW1. A native could never have this sense of wandering into the world of Story. (Or maybe they could--maybe that’s one reason why people love Hardy so much--you can actually tramp out to look at the dairy where Tess met Angel, take a walk to see the church wall and stained-glass window she lay under and thought about noble ancestors long-gone.) 
In the US a few places have that same sense of existing half in reality and half in story. Manhattan appeals to me because of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (and the novels of S.J. Rozen and a hundred movies). Hoofing it through the West Eighties, I look up at the buildings and wonder which one has an upper floor full of orchids. Boston belongs to Robert Parker, Chicago to Sarah Paretsky, New Orleans (I admit it) to Anne Rice and her vampires. I sort of have that feeling about the Avenues in Salt Lake, since my own story is set there and exists in an imaginative Avenues overlaid on top of the real one.
But England is covered, leaf by leaf, with the pages of stories from even before I could read--Peter Rabbit, Rat and Mole, Christopher Robin, Wendy Darling and her brothers, Mr. Tumnus, Tom Bombadil, Arthur and Merlin. How fortunate I am to walk and breathe in my own body through the land of imagination.
on the High Street and peeking into the rectory garden (if “rectories” are what they’re called in Catholic parishes), I noticed something giving me strong waves of joy and nostalgia--the smell of the air. John thought it might be the cereal factory, and it is a sort of a breakfast smell. I wonder what the yellow fields are across from our window. I don’t think it’s strictly wheat--it doesn’t smell like my dad’s farm. Maybe it’s just the scent of grass hay. Whatever plant or combination of plants it is (and I noticed it on the other side of Dorchester too, so I don’t think it’s just the cereal factory), it is very evocative--maybe even more so before I noticed it.I was thinking too, how for an early bookworm like me, England is Storybook Land. The second-hand book sale in the church hall reminded me of it. The hedgerows and little fields, the narrow streets of the village,
the market, the Church, the broad-faced farm woman in a skirt and wellies (even her tarty daughter with pink hair and a lip piercing), are all denizens of that land. It’s magical because I met it first in a book. The Pevinses England is just as fantastical to me as Narnia is. Even grimy, busy London is magic, from Oliver Twist to Sherlock Holmes to Mrs. Dalloway to Peter Wimsey to Rumpole to Inspector Dalgliesh. Who knows who I’ll run into next week in Baker Street or St. James Park or the Old Bailey or Whitechapel Road or Kensington SW1. A native could never have this sense of wandering into the world of Story. (Or maybe they could--maybe that’s one reason why people love Hardy so much--you can actually tramp out to look at the dairy where Tess met Angel, take a walk to see the church wall and stained-glass window she lay under and thought about noble ancestors long-gone.) In the US a few places have that same sense of existing half in reality and half in story. Manhattan appeals to me because of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (and the novels of S.J. Rozen and a hundred movies). Hoofing it through the West Eighties, I look up at the buildings and wonder which one has an upper floor full of orchids. Boston belongs to Robert Parker, Chicago to Sarah Paretsky, New Orleans (I admit it) to Anne Rice and her vampires. I sort of have that feeling about the Avenues in Salt Lake, since my own story is set there and exists in an imaginative Avenues overlaid on top of the real one.
But England is covered, leaf by leaf, with the pages of stories from even before I could read--Peter Rabbit, Rat and Mole, Christopher Robin, Wendy Darling and her brothers, Mr. Tumnus, Tom Bombadil, Arthur and Merlin. How fortunate I am to walk and breathe in my own body through the land of imagination.
2 comments:
I'm enjoying the updates and the photos. It looks like a very enjoyable visit. "Rectories" do exist in Catholicism, if that was the question.
And since I could never pass up an opening to a political discussion, however much in poor taste, Tony Blair deserves no apology or redemption, the deaths of those in Iraq and the suffering of the displaced will always be hung around his neck just as it is GWB's. The fact that the majority of UK citizens opposed the war from the outset shows how hollow our self-congratulatory version of Western democracy really is, and how complacent our bovine citizenries.
Ok, sorry about that interjection (and I know I'm preaching to the choir). I'm in a heightened political state here at the Catholic Bishops' National Migration Conference in DC. Please keep posting updates, which I will read wishing I were there, but perhaps in the next town over so you and Dad could enjoy some well-deserved privacy.
I agree with Dave about the much deserved privacy. It is so cozy to think of you and Dad walking around together in the land of literature, eating cheese and bread on benches. I miss you terribly but so glad you are enjoying each other and England so much.
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