Common Nature

That’s a sense of millennia-deep layered mythic continuity and connection to the land that White Americans don’t get to have: the suburb where I grew up hadn’t much in the way of structures much older than me, or at most my parents (and even a lot of those have been razed and redeveloped since; my mother, during her last visit, had to relearn her way around the neighborhood.)

(Of course, that’s what we get in a place where we’re an invasive presence, having bulldozed over or appropriated the millennia-old historical markers—including language and memory—of the people who have that rightful claim.)