VOL. 3 ... No. 112. July 23, 2025
Howdy Humpsters,
Welcome back, my friends, and welcome new subscribers! Thanks for joining me here.
As it turns out, today’s edition of the Hump Day Gazette is not quite finished. I have been musing on an idea, but it hasn’t fully jelled. So, I’m sending it to you “in process.” Maybe it will stir observations or emotions in you. If so, I hope you will share them with me.
What does “place” mean to you? Your place in the world. Where you live. The place that formed you. The place of your greatest joy or deepest sorrow. The place where your loved ones are buried. How does place pull you? Does the place where you live nurture you? Or do you feel trapped?
I am half-way through a memoir written by Pam Houston called, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, and it has stirred in me thoughts about place and what that might mean for me now.
Deep Creek is a series of essays — part memoir of a childhood filled with horrific parental abuse and part stories about land and Pam Houston’s relationship to it. Although she travels all over the world to teach and lecture, her heart resides in Blair Ranch, a 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, which she financed with the trusting landowner for five percent down and an autographed copy of her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness.
She says of Blair ranch, an untamed and often perilous Eden, “One of the gifts of age is the way it gently dispels all our heroic notions. All that time I thought I was busy taking care of the ranch, the ranch was busy taking care of me.”
She feels a commitment to nurture the land and the wild and domestic creatures living there — to share with them and to learn from them. As she says, she wants to “live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief . . . to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”
I’ve recently begun to think of “place” as a metaphor for the self — where we live mirrors what lives within us. Nowhere is this more true than with Houston. Her outer world reflects a life that has been filled with adventure, danger, struggle, and brazen, jaw-dropping beauty. Her development as a human being was born out of huge, tectonic shifts within, afire with magma bubbling below the surface — much like the Rockies that have nurtured her.
The land that nurtures her spirit would kill mine. Beautiful as it is, I was not made for thirty-below temperatures, mountain lions, and stacking wood for the stove.
If the outer world reflects our inner one, what does that say about the degradation of our planet and the ongoing loss of diversity in nature? The volatile weather patterns? The extreme heat.
The world is still a beautiful place — exquisite even — but our losses are piling up. If we don’t nurture the land, how can it nurture us?
Where is my place now?
Stu and I have been traveling for the last three years, trying new places, exploring options, and we plan to travel more. This constant change has impacted my sense of place and belonging. We haven’t stayed anywhere long enough to get attached during these last three years, so I feel as if I belong to the world and nowhere at the same time. This detachment both challenges and excites me. Much of life is about learning to let go — of things, of people, of fixed ideas. To love without owning. Eventually we have to let go of everything.
Even though I will most likely never live there again, Georgia, in the American South, where I spent my childhood, still colors my inner landscape. It has been the place I’ve returned to again and again to better understand myself. To heal. To forgive. It is a conflicted place, lush with lightning bugs and steam heat, drunk on religion, overgrown by kudzu, and graced by music born out of Africa and Europe — music nurtured by people too poor to afford anything except to sing their prayers towards heaven at the end of a hard day. Blues, jazz, country, rockabilly, gospel, and rock and roll — music in the south made love across the racial divide.
Even if the people couldn’t.
A place like Georgia either holds you tight from the cradle to the grave with a sense of belonging so strong that it defines who you are and nurtures who you will become, or it sends you hurtling out at the first opportunity, seeking answers to who you are in the context of the wider world. I fall into this latter camp.
Friends, here’s where I would normally write the paragraphs that tie all this together, but it’s a reflection of my inner world that I cannot. I am still searching.
Tell me what place means to you.
My defining place is a moving target.
Until next time, my friends . . . get outside. Connect with nature and feel the warmth of the sun on your beautiful faces.
With love,
Janna
Quotes Of The Week:
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
The past beats inside me like a second heart. ― John Banville, The Sea
After fifty years in the NC mountains on a farm, that is very much my place. Yet another place in my heart is the long ago Florida home of my grandparents, guarded by live oaks and filled with peace and love. I can't go back, of course. The house is still there but the Florida of my youth has grown like a cancer into a hateful thing.
A beautiful essay, Janna. And your followers write beautifully, too. I can't add anything better than what you and they have written. Further reading? - Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray