Recalling A Sense of Place

The intimate link between landscape and memory comes

through the act of writing and “through the power of observation,

the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place

first rises up in our mind; afterward, it is memory that carries the place,

that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. For as long as

our records go back, we have held these two things dear: landscape

and memory.” –Barry Lopez “Losing Our Sense of Place”

This week, I am asking you to travel in your memory to a place that is dear to you, a place that conjures

feelings of warmth, comfort, safety, home. In class on Thursday, we made a list and then isolated

one place to describe, taking time to recall vivid sensory details that will help

place our reader in the space, in the feeling of the space, in the essence of the place. 

By Monday, Sept 16, post your Sense of Place piece (300-500 words) on the blog. 

By class time on Thursday, Sept 19, you are to have read and responded to at least

four other peoples' Sense of Place pieces here on the blog. 

I can't wait to read what you write. 

Here is my Sense of Place piece to inspire you (hopefully!): 

When I was growing up, my family's daily conversations, our celebrations, our sadnesses and our strife always coalesced around the dining room table, where food and drink were plentiful and symbolic. When Tevye sings about “tradition!” in Fiddler on the Roof, he is talking about my family, where the methods of mincing the garlic, hand-grinding the pork and kneading the bread with two hands were as important to learn as reading and writing.

Each year, the day after Thanksgiving, my father and I gather ourselves, our tools, and our ingredients in the kitchen of our camp in the deep North woods to make Hungarian stuffed cabbage, a daylong ritual that ends in a feast. We begin with pork loin and ham and at least three whole cabbages. True to fashion, my father is sure to comment about the quality of the meat, claiming each year that the cuts he got from the butcher look even better than the last. As he cuts the meat into chunks small enough to pass through my grandmother’s meat grinder, I begin to feed them into the grinder; he turns the crank and gently peels the excess fat away from the spacer, the worn wooden handle he’s turning revealing the grease of hundred years of this same tradition. When the meat is ground and piled on a cookie sheet at our feet, we scoop it up and put it in a massive bowl into which we also add minced onion, garlic, salt, pepper, three eggs, and a lot of paprika. Though my mother has a Hungarian cookbook that we pretend to consult, my pop and I really measure with our eyeballs and our fingers, throwing in a “touch” of salt or another clove of garlic based on our best guess and on years of making this same dish. Once the filling is made, we need to steam the cabbages and get them ready for peeling.

Each cabbage leaf becomes a new home to a tiny package of savory stuffing spiced with rich, red Eastern European peppers. After I fill the cabbage leaf, I roll the leaf up, like a cigar, fold each of the ends together and push them into the small cabbage parcel, thereby making a seamless roll that’s ready to go in the pot, which is by now lined with sauerkraut and pork bones. As my father steams the cabbages and peels off scalding layer after layer of leaves, I am at my rolling post, filling each leaf with the mixture, stuffing and tucking and stacking them in the large stainless steel pot. My father, a numbers man, loves to keep track of how many I get in a layer and, then, how many we have total. After a day of cooking and anticipating the deliciousness, he will exclaim, “I’ll bet you I can eat 10 this year!” As we revel in our teamwork and accomplishment, with the pot of stuffed cabbage simmering on the stove, we usually have a shot or two of palinka, Hungarian spirits made from fruit. We toast one another and then it’s “down the hatch,” as my pop says. We toast the pot of “pigs,” family and a good life and good food. These are our simple prayers. And, then the feast begins.