The novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner, in his book Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, reflects that: “Place is not a place until people have been born into it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, and died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, communities. ... Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”
This kind of year-by-year accrual runs in striking contrast to what we’re seeing around us right now. The most visible parts of American social life are fractured and polarized. We’ve lost our ability, even appetite,