Learning To Love This Land

I love Wilber, Nebraska, and these United States. I don't agree with their form of government, but that has nothing to do with my attachment to them.

From the Front Porch Republic

By Frank DeVito

As time passes, I realize [that] this idea of loving one’s home, one’s land, one’s place often threatens to exist more as an abstract idea than as a lived reality.

The love of one’s local place should be a foundational part of a conservative worldview. In order to conserve what is good and true and beautiful, you have to be rooted in a place where those transcendental values are real and concrete.

I first learned to love a place by example, by the great love with which my wife’s family loves the little piece of eastern Pennsylvania we call home. With every year that we live in this county, I gain a deeper appreciation for the people, the roads, the forest-covered little mountains both to the north and south that make our region a “Valley.” I have turned down interesting job opportunities over the years because they would move me to Washington, DC or Philadelphia, but I will not go. I fully intend to die in the county in which I now live, and I hope my children and my children’s children will do the same.

I have reflected particularly on this need to be intergenerationally rooted in a place in recent weeks, since the death of Wendell Berry. Jayber Crow was perhaps the most profound influence, after my wife’s family, that made me take this rootedness, this love of one’s home, seriously in my own life. There is something not only romantic or beautiful but profoundly human about knowing a place, a community, a people, a landscape so well that they become part of the very fabric of your being.

But as time passes, I realize the extent to which this idea of loving one’s home, one’s land, one’s place often threatens to exist more as an abstract idea than as a lived reality. Conservative intellectuals may truly embrace the idea of localism from their positions in metropolitan think tanks or manicured suburbs. And that intellectual embrace is a good thing. But as we see from the genius of Wendell Berry’s experience, until one really knows a bit of particular land, appreciation for the love of place can only go so deep. Berry was able to write as a prophet of place because he knew his own place, from the neighbors to the very soil, over the course of a very fruitful lifetime.

I am learning this myself, not just in my mind but in my lived reality, by engagement with my own land. I am originally a product of the suburbs, growing up just over the New York border in southwestern Connecticut—essentially an extension of the NYC commuter suburbs. Gardens were decorative. Front lawns were small enough to mow with a push-mower in under a half hour. Landscaping was an outsourced endeavor. And I took that mentality with me as an adult: my inclination is to pay someone to do house projects or yard work as often as possible.

Yet, two years ago we moved from the small house our family had outgrown to the home and property where I plan to spend the rest of my life. It is still in a neighborhood, in a sense. But it is different: while we only have an acre of property, it is not a typical suburban lot. The edges are thick with pines and black walnuts. The sloping yard has large sections of various flowering bushes and wild raspberries. Dozens of species of birds come and go. Families of eagles and hawks perch on the high tower in an adjacent field. And before we got a German Shepherd, groundhogs burrowed around the edges of the property, and foxes and raccoons vied for access to our henhouse. It is a small property, but it is wild.

A northeastern suburbanite by upbringing, I initially balked at the idea of spending evenings after the kids go to bed or Saturday afternoons tending to this little bit of nature, sawing branches and pulling weeds and bringing order from nature’s chaos. I’m a writer and an amateur intellectual, after all. Can’t someone else do the landscaping?

But my wife was (correctly) convinced that this was our land, our property, and it needed our care. So little by little, we got to work. The tall lines of pine trees, our natural barrier between the road on one side and the neighboring lot on the other, were in danger of dying. The lower branches were bare; the trunks were lined with vines choking the trees to death. So we started fighting back. As I began firing up the chainsaw and cutting through the layers of dead branches, we got to the heart of the problem. Poison ivy climbing the tree trunks. Virginia creeper wrapping itself among the branches. Mulberries growing up from the undergrowth and smothering the once-mighty pines. There was a diverse, fascinating array of wilderness attempting to return our property from a well-cultivated lot to a thick, dense forest.

While I admittedly still prefer my desk and my books to a pair of gloves and hedge clippers, I have begun learning to love this work. More accurately, I love the land. What was once simply the yard around the house that I purchased has become more intimately my land, my place. I know which trees are more likely to attract invasive vines, and I know the different species of vine. I am starting to tell which plants are dead and which can be revived if properly cared for. And I (finally) know the difference between Virginia creeper and poison ivy.

This is not merely an exercise in identifying wildlife. Being from a place is not merely about knowing who your neighbors are or appreciating the local businesses and accents and customs. It is about being intimately familiar with every detail of the place. My land is not merely mine because I hold the deed. Ultimately, God is master of everything. He gives us ownership of property, yes. But we are stewards. It would be a weak hold on my property to merely occupy the space without knowing it intimately. Every bush that attracts butterflies, every type of bird that perches in our branches, every invasive plant vying for control of our little forest, is part of what God has given me. I must tend it, love it, bring order to it. And to do that, I must know it. Hands that do not pull weeds, tend plants, and accept the occasional thorn are not the hands of one who actually knows his place.

Perhaps this reality sheds light on the wisdom of the founders of this country originally limiting voting rights to owners of property. Property ownership was not a mere status symbol, a sign of wealth. Those who owned property were intimately tied to the land and, therefore, to the place of which they were a part. Renters come and go; owners are part of the place. They know it. They tend it. Therefore, they have a vested interest in the laws that govern it and bring about its good.

Not everyone necessarily has to cut dead branches, pull Virginia creeper out of pine trees, and plant fruit trees on their property to love their land and their place. But there is a deep reality to be found here: God has given each of us a place in this life that He owns but asks us to steward and tend. That reality, that love of a place, is hard to access by reading and thought alone.

As I look out on the trees, observe the flora and fauna around the four corners of the property I am blessed to have, and feel the dull ache of a splinter in my left index finger, I feel deeply what it is to be from a place. This is my place. I tend it. I care for it. I love it. And because of that, I can appreciate with a depth I have never before experienced what it means to be intimately tied to the land, to home.