After reading Kim-Chi Le's post, it also reminded me of a value I put on a place. My grandparent's farm. I am from a really rural part of southern Virginia where farming is a pretty regular practice. Well, it used to be. The government now pays the tobacco farmers millions of dollars not to farm anymore. Small family farming is not sufficient anymore, they have better ways of mass producing any product that is needed. My grandfather used to grow tobacco and I have memories as a child running around the old hand built tobacco barns full of drying tobacco leaves. I remember seeing strange faces and strange languages of people from Mexico, who came up every season in swarms to help the farmers who were loyal to them in return by giving them a free place to stay and food in exchange for work.
As well as the smells of tobacco and sounds of strange languages, I remember my grandmother's food. She grows just about everything in her gardens. It is a regular thing in my town for everyone to grow tons of food and then give the majority of it away to neighbors and friends. It is a great thing except when you'd love to have a good strawberry in December and you can't have one because it is not season, yet in the summer there are so many that you get sick of them. The summer time is the season for fruits; cantalopes and watermelons get left on our back porch on a regular basis. Nothing beats my grandmother's fruits and vegetables. She even made her own biscuits and jelly. Every time i would go to her house she would insist I eat some of her food. She would pull out mason jars of string beans, tomatos, pickles, butterbeans, and fix a big meal with homemade biscuits and always ice cream after. I am picky when i go to the grocery store, especially here in Newport News. Most of the canned vegetables taste really terrible. I grew up eating garden-grown foods and it is hard to adapt to the mass produced versions of these things. There is a certain affinity I have for the taste that comes with eating my grandmother's food, as well as the memory. There is so much more that comes with eating a bowl of my grandmother's garden grown string beans versus the canned version they sell in the grocery store. It's not the same. For someone else, the canned version is all they know. For someone else, the canned version could be the best they've ever tasted. The difference with my experience is the sense of quality i get with eating them, and the nostalgic quality of their indulgence.
The attachment i have to my grandparent's farm comes from years and years of comforting appeal to many of my senses, and the love that came with the appeal of those senses. I am automatically happy when i go see them or walk around the farm. My memories of the farm are a continuance and overlap my mother's memories. It also have value to my mom because she has memories of her own, growing up there when the world was a lot different than it is now. The place comes with many myths: the deaf horse, rescuing baby deer, the wandering mule, the sad deaths of dogs and cats, times when the 'wolves' came, the beetle years, the constant flow of cows in and out of the pastures, all having different spots, characteristics and personalities every year, even a cemetery is supposed to be somewhere out in the woods with stories of its own, stories of my grandpa's family who lived there before him, and those who lived before them. The place is sacred now because it has history, it has stories, it has my memories, and my mothers, and our value of the place is based on our knowledge of the myths that exist there, and our own personal attachments that have grown from having that place. But despite that, the feeling is real. The feeling I have when I am there is the same feeling the Aborigine's must get when they visit their holy sites. Because it's not just about spirituality, its about value. It's about how the place affects your life. In that way, the value i put on my grandparent's farm is my spirituality, is my truth. The myths that come with the place create my truth, shape my life.
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