The Place Is Still There

Nobody died. Nothing was knocked down. That is the whole difficulty in two sentences.

The lane is exactly where it was. The wall is the same wall and you could tell somebody which stone came out in the eighties. The church is standing and better maintained than it was in your childhood.

The shop went in 2011 and the school shut four years after that, and neither of those is a tragedy; both of them had been going for years and everybody could see it coming.

Most of the houses are lived in. Some of them are lived in better than they have ever been, by decent people who have done good work on them and who say hello.

And you walked down that lane in the spring and something went through you that you have not been able to describe to anybody since.

You are not against change and you would not want anybody to think you were. You are not one of those men in the paper complaining about incomers.

But there is a thing you have lost and you cannot say what it is.

You have tried to look it up, in the way a person does at eleven at night, and everything you found was about places that had been destroyed, or emptied, or ruined. Yours has been improved.

So there is no word for it and no page for it, and after a while you stopped looking.

What this page will not do

I am not going to explain it to you. This is the part of the site where explanations are refused, and this is a case where an explanation would be worse than nothing, because every one available is slightly insulting.

I am not going to tell you it is nostalgia. It is not, and being told so is what has kept you from mentioning it, because nostalgia is a thing people say when they want to close a subject.

I am not going to tell you that change is inevitable and that you should make peace with it. That is true and it is not the point and you have known it since 2011. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 90:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

I am not going to make it about the incomers, because it is not about them and you would not want it to be and they have been kind to you.

And I am not going to tell you what you lost, because I do not know, and neither do you, and that is the actual state of things.

You are not being unreasonable by grieving something intact. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not require the loss to be nameable or the thing to have been destroyed, and the Holy Spirit is in that lane with a man who cannot say what is missing.

The verse is about where a person lives

There is a line at the start of Psalm 90 that is worth having in a case like yours, and it is not a consolation prize.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.Psalm 90:1

Dwelling place. Not fortress, not refuge in the sense of somewhere you run to in trouble. The word is about where you live, ordinarily, on a Tuesday.

And then in all generations, which is the phrase that does the work here.

That psalm is attributed to Moses, and if that is right it was written by a man with no place at all: born in one country, raised in a household that was not his, forty years somewhere else, and then forty more in a wilderness with a people who had no address between them.

He is the last man on earth you would expect to write about dwelling.

And what he says is not that God will give them a place. It is that God has been the place, across generations, for people who kept losing theirs.

That is not an explanation of what happened to your village and it does not tell you what you lost. It is a statement about where a person actually lives, made by somebody who had every reason to know the difference between a place and a location.

You are not without a dwelling. Scripture says Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations, Psalm 90:1, and the dwelling is ordinary rather than emergency and it is described as having held across generations of displacement, and the Holy Spirit is not offering that as a substitute for the lane.

Why there is no word for it

Because our vocabulary for loss is built on absence, and nothing is absent.

Every word available to you assumes a hole: bereavement, ruin, decline, dereliction. Your village has none of those. It is well kept and cheerful and the pub reopened.

What is gone is not any of the things, it is the relation between them: the fact that you knew what every light being on at that hour meant, and who would be in the shop on a Thursday, and what a particular tractor going past at six o'clock told you about somebody's week.

That is not an object. It cannot be photographed, it does not appear on any list of what a village contains, and there is no English word for it, so there is no page.

You have not been able to look up a thing that has no noun.

You are not describing something that is not real. Scripture says thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book, Psalm 56:8, and the keeping is of the wandering itself rather than of an itemized account of it, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring an inventory before He takes something seriously.

What is available

Not a name. Not a resolution.

It can be said out loud, standing in the actual lane, in plain words, to God.

Nobody died and nothing was knocked down and I have lost something and I do not know what it is.

That is the whole thing. It is not a prayer that asks for anything and there is nothing in it to be granted.

But you have been carrying it since the spring without once putting it outside yourself, and a man does not have to understand a thing in order to hand it over. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 90:1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

And if there is one person left who would know what you meant, an old neighbor, somebody from the school, tell them. Not to be agreed with. Just so that it has been said between two people who were both there.

You are not required to make sense of it first. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and pouring out has no requirement of coherence attached to it, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a man to work out what he means.