All Water Has a Perfect Memory

Windbreak of trees still standing at the site of The Ankerage, Loudoun County, VA.

Mine was a characteristically suburban youth.

The smell of Summer is the perfume of chlorine and swimming lessons, of cut grass and gasoline, of the neatly mown lawn. My father remains exact on this point, so that one row builds upon another; perfect circles around hemispheres of thick-cut mulch forming the base of a weeping cherry. Smells that are the product of our human attempt to control nature. It is a neighborhood where men take pride in cutting their own grass.

We were one of the first to move in on our street. We spoke to, or at least my parents interacted with, very few of our neighbors. Anyone who knows my parents would realize this is not from a lack of friendliness on their part, but rather an indication of the dysfunctional reality of some of those living immediately around us. A family from Baton Rouge lived behind us, and it was they who introduced the habit among the neighborhood children of addressing our elders in the community by Mister or Miss followed by the individuals first name. To this day Miss C- is still Miss C-. But then of course there were Mr. and Mrs. M--no use of first names for them.

The M--'s lived to the east-- I couldn't even begin to tell you their first names despite they fact they resided mere feet away for nearly 2 decades, for they came and they went silently each morning. That strange dance of the automatic garage door opening, the sedan pulling out ever so quietly and like a tango with a motion forward then back, the car would return after 6:00, the garage would open, swallowing the car for another evening until the alarm rang once again and the tempo of the sad dance was declared by metronome in the form of brewing coffee. At night, Mr. and Mrs. M--they had one son--would go for walks around the neighborhood. I imagine on these walks they may have talked about the yards of houses much like their own. They would occasionally raise a careful and reserved hand in a gesture of hello, but that was all. I was terrified of their son. He rode a skateboard and had strange hair and once asked me, unmercifully, what I was, that I wasn't an American, because look at my father who was a shade darker than myself.

I recall when the house directly to the west of us was the Chestnut Run Sales Center, staffed by a woman who I imagine smoking cigarettes behind the lilac. The garage was the office. I was fascinated by this. In place of a garage door there was a continuous line of french doors that opened into a finished space, a tall vaulted ceiling with skylights. samples of hardwood floor finishes and grades of carpet hung from the wall. The first occupants of the house left it that way, until a naval officer and his family bought it in the late 80's--after the old people with the talking parrot named Crakers departed. Later, in moved a Baptist minister from--another neighbor from Louisiana-- whose daughter used to tell me that "southerners were friendly until they were mad enough to kill you." I don't know if that was her quote or someone else's. She was older and in high school, and thus commanded a certain reverence. During the age of the sales office, a large display case rendered the geography of the neighborhood. It was the community in miniature, color coded to indicate those houses for sale and those that had become the embodiment of someone's American Dream materialized in brick and wood and aluminum siding. Behind our house--our model was called "The Dandridge"-- with its hipped roof and dentil molding that faintly whispered Post-Modern Georgian Colonial, were rolling hills of red Virginia clay that looked more of Mars than of the lower Piedmont. In my grandfather's childhood, this had been a meadow where dairy cows produced milk for the breakfast tables of Washington. I can distinctly remember sitting at the dining room table and watching a consturction worker hang siding in the late summer sun. In the evening we would walk with my father across newly paved streets, the skeletons of housing rising to the right and left. We collected discarded pieces of lumber which we fashioned into pistols and among the dusty red clay streets, with construction as temporary as faux facades in a Western, we reenacted scenes from histories that never happened.

Behind our house ran a trickle of water, almost completely forgotten in an attempt to reshape the face of the earth. It was a stream that appeared only after the heaviest rain. "All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was" wrote Toni Morrison. And in my experience, be it in Charleston or New Orleans or on Constitution Avenue, I've always found this to be the case. That stream connects with a larger body of water that ultimately merges with the Potomac. Horse Pen Run, named by my Great-Great-Great Grandfather---or at least the Gospel According to Grandfather's Family tells us--formed the boundary of what had been our farm from the early 19th-Century up until the 1970s. The Ankerage. This is what they called it in birth announcements and invitations and obituaries, simply The Ankerage. A perfectly neat, white clapboard farm house, with a gracious porch and a mansard roof, the black louvered shutters that closed tight during hot months, reaching into some deep imagined and pretentious past of English Manor houses and castles identified by proper names. My grandfather told stories of his grandfather, as a child during the Civil War, being told to get away from the window for fear of a bullet grazing his head as General Mosby played hide-and-seek across the Northern Virginia countryside. In the evening, if you stand at the same spot where that window would have been--The Ankerage, in its first incarnation, burned in 1917--you would look out at a tired line of bureaucrats making their way in from Washington, the entire scene lit by the the red bulls-eye of a Super Target, the sun setting over the hills of western Loudoun County, far off in the distance. This is the amnesia of the modern south, where the ghosts of history often cross into the reality of a homogeneous culture--unknown to the people who inhabit this space, who come from all places, whose language and diction has solidified so that we speak like men on the television selling cars or promises of international peace.

Whenever I hear someone say northern Virginia is not the South a bizarre combination of relief and sadness washes over me. The relief: an indication of thanks given for a certain disassociation with the modern political reality and the historical social inequity, the ghosts of past and present, that continue to haunt our national conscience. The sadness: for what has passed, the thought that in a few decades a place could become so unrecognizable as to have it's memory completely erased.

Nearly every spring my father's yard is a palette of pinks and whites, beginning with the weeping cherry and the Bradford Pear, transitioning into hyacinth and jonquil, ending in an obscene display of color from at least 10 varieties of paeony. He refers to it as his festival. I generally don't like Bradford Pears. To begin with, there is that smell which I needn't describe here in graphic detail. Second, there is their shape, I suspect , which makes them so susceptible to collapse due to top-heaviness and is probably the result of man's genetic interference. A few years ago, the largest of the Bradford's split right down the middle during a spring storm with a surprising ferocity. Without any hope of it coming back---at least not in any shape that could be called ornamental--my father cut it down. Mr. M saw this from the adjoining yard. He went to the garage and pulled out a chain saw and joined my father at the fallen tree. I wasn't there, but I imagine few words were exchanged. A few months later, Mr. and Mrs. M sold their house and moved away as quietly as they had lived in it.