Où sont les neiges d'antan?

"If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place." -- Yi-Fu Tuan, a geographer and a notable explorer of the notion of place

These United States is a land of dislocation and discontinuity. Our forefathers suffered the original form of nostaliga. A geographic disease. A literal home sickness. They would call the new land after their places of origin. Names such New York, Delhi, Richmond Hill, or New Orleans.

Our 21st century generation no longer has a sense of physical or geographic place. The important of place and distance has eroded over the years, overtaken by consciousness of time. One aireline ad suggests, we are free to "move about the country" while airborne. Even on terra firma, instead of referring traveling by car from Modesto to San Francisco the distance about 90 miles, we now say the trip takes about an hour and 45 minutes.

For us Americans, nostalgia has now shifted to a feeling of sentimentality. We yearn for the bucolic and pastoral "good ol' days." But we don't have much a clue what those days were. In our sentimentality we call our surburbs and townships "Oakdale", "Maple Ridge", or "Quail Lake" just so to assuage our rootless angst. For those of us Modestans who live in the vicinity of the "Sherwood Forest", we might feel warm and fuzzy about the subdivision and its name. The truth is, we don't live in a forest. There are houses, street lights, asphalt pavement, curbside mailboxes, a gas station, and a park named Sherwood.

Like many mobile Americans, I don't really know the space on which I now pause. The place I now sleep with a roof over my head is home. The city where my home is located I call hometown. And yet, I know very little of the Central Valley landscape upon which the city Modesto is built. As I see it, the landscape breathes life into a place. It is the voice of ancestors, the living, the myth, and history.

François Villon, in his work, "Ballade des dames du temp jadis", asks this question: "Où sont les neiges d'antan?" (Where are the snows of yesteryear?) His longing question implies that the snows have been moved somewhere else, a place one might, with luck, find. Not a tranquil thought or prospect anyway one looks at it.

Christmas is marked by a metamorphosis in space and time 2000 years or so ago. A visitation by God upon humanity forever transformed the direction of history. A minor and less seismic transformation is needed at where I now paused.

The residents in the neighborhood are mostly strangers to me. Each of us lives in a regulated existence cocooned in his comfort zone. For the past several Christmas seaons, it has been my ritual to visit others living in the nearby streets. The last several days I brought with me either poinsettias or a pasta baskets to the families nearby. Two days ago I met a new neighbor whose native tongoue is Spanish. The family keeps an immaculate house and yard. To the contiguous neighbors I rekindled the spirit of community . Today I visited two familes, one of which was the elderly widow Mrs. Hoffman. She and I spent hours regaled each others with antics. There is one more family to see tomorrow. A widower and his two late teen children.

Slowly, I am learning where on earth I stand. The snows of yesteryears I will leave with Villon.