The Situation and the Story

A personal essay from me + writing prompt for you

Every one of us comes from somewhere—specific coordinates of time and place.

Perhaps “who” is the primary question, but close behind, the story of “where.” The story of our certain placedness. Like a fine wine, we all have a distinct terroir. 

Our family moved (locally) just before Christmas. Our “who” is the same as ever, but the scene has changed, and our “where” now tells a new story. 

Hello from my new pink palace! People have been asking if we plan to renovate. I do not.

Between job changes and grad programs, this is Zach’s and my eighth move together, though our first with kids. 

We started life together in upstate New York in a shoebox apartment that sat atop the house of one of Zach’s childhood babysitters. When we moved out, we cleaned out the fridge and defrosted the freezer, completely forgetting—to our eternal mortification—that within it we had left the free turkey Zach got from his work from Thanksgiving. It took them weeks to find it. We only heard about this secondhand—our landlords never said a word.

We lived in a small knobby-brick house we called “The Gingerbread House,” where we put a small garden plot out back and I grew far-too-peppery arugula. 

Our rental in Florida backed up to something called hourglass lake, and our realtor spooked me good when I asked him about gators and he said he wouldn’t let the dog out unsupervised. The entire yard was enclosed by an eight-foot-tall fence. If we were gone too long for Christmas travel, we would return to find tiny white mushrooms sprouted along the bathtub caulk like ducklings in a row.

We lived in a Victorian four square in Michigan, where we ripped out dirty carpets and restored the hardwood floor underneath. 

We lived in a flipped rental in Tennessee, which fit our needs but felt more house than home, especially after we came home from a weekend away to find someone had broken in and swept the place. I found forensic dust in the windowsills, my underwear drawer, for months.

Then we moved to an uptown row house in Pennsylvania’s capital city—tall and warm and with walls of exposed brick. We bought it sight unseen because we were still in Tennessee and at that stage in the pandemic, our realtor wasn’t legally allowed to do walk-throughs, even for locals. 

This is the house we brought our babies home to. It’s where our daughter took her first steps, tracing her fingers around the lower fringe of the Christmas tree. I can walk down the street and run into five neighbors who all know my children by name and the Italian family who owns the bakery across the street always gives my toddler a cookie. It was not an easy place to leave (though we moved a scant mile).

The origin story of where we are now went something like this: we weren’t looking to move. It wasn’t the right time. We had a baby in the house, after all. But it was the right place, and as soon as Zach and I walked through it to see for ourselves, we both knew it. It wasn’t the right time, but this house called us by name. 

I did what I do, which is use my words, and wrote a letter to the seller. I wrote about the strong sense of place of the house, how it spoke to us. When the call from our realtor came, we were nail-biting, knowing there were multiple offers. There were, and ours wasn’t the highest, but “Stephanie won this deal,” is how our realtor told us.

This is our eighth move together, and if we’ve done it right, our last. The house is old, of course—layered and memoried. Moss and lichen overlay slate and stone. Old copper is ringed with aquamarine blooms. It has a very midcentury little library room with built-ins. A bathroom resplendent (repugnant?) with outrageous pink tile (see for yourself!) that might be Wes Anderson’s or Betty Draper’s, depending on the light. There are trees I couldn’t wrap my arms around, and a few weeks ago, two bald eagles were spotted in the big tree out front. 

The view from our library—I feel so much more settled after unpacking the books in the house.

A place is like river rock—it has strata, fossils, stories to tell, but only if it’s willing to give them up. And let me tell you this house has lore. It has stories to tell of love and loss, distinguished guests who have stayed here once upon a time, epic Christmas parties. We feel honored to live into this continued story, to add another line to its guest book.

The way I see it, this house isn’t “ours” in the traditional sense of ownership, because I don’t think possession is the defining feature of this relationship. Rather, this relationship is one of stewardship (that dusty word, but none other will do)—mutual caretaking. 

As we’ve been settling in, I have been thinking of Vivian Gornick’s words, as she wrote famously:

“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” 

It must also be said that a sense of place or a situation might feel like home as much as it might feel unsafe or precarious. Placedness might mean Mary Karr’s Texas with its skillet-hot asphalt and abrasive sun. It might mean Toni Morrison’s tragedy-haunted 124 house in Beloved. It might mean suburban stoplights and strip malls just as much as a candlelit table somewhere in Paris, lest we overromanticize things. 

The situation, then—what’s yours?

What are the places of your origin story, and where do you find yourself now? How has your sense of place influenced the shape of your life, your sense of self? What are the places for you that have felt like home? What are the places that have haunted? What are the sights, sounds, and sensory memories of such places for you?

And the story—you’ve got lore of your own, make no mistake. What story are you living from your situation right now?

What are the tensions you are currently engaging, and what does such engagement speak of your becoming? We might not know yet what we have come to say, but by tending to the precise coordinates of any given here and now, we can take heart that, with time, we will. 

Our lives are composed of many moves, many eras, just as much strata as river rock. Whatever your situationship of late, whatever the specific coordinates of your time and place, may you find grounding in in both situation and story—because life, like literature, asks after both.

This, I think, is the invitation:

Keep in contact with the situation—writing (or living) that loses touch with placedness, with the tangible world, loses all that sacred memory. We are wise who know our terroir—the soil from which we come, the notes it brings out in us. 

Stay awake to the story—life (and writing) is more than the flat logistics of getting through the day’s situation. The “emotional experience” is worth tending to tenderly. Think of it this way: any scene you’re in now is the setting for the plot of your becoming, and that is a story indeed. 

Whatever your situationship of late, may you be buoyed by all the places you have called home, all the places that have played haven to your nervous system, held it in rest state. May that sense of security embolden you to step out, step forward, and continue in the unfolding story that is yours alone.

Until next time,

Take heart. Write on. You got this.

P.S.

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