At the end of May I moved out of the Summit Avenue house I had rented for the past eight-and-a-half years and into a townhouse a stone’s throw from the Susquehanna River on the other side of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. I hadn’t relished the thought of packing hundreds of books, loading boxes and furniture into a U-haul, and disconnecting and reconnecting utilities, but I’ve long known these are the inevitable consequences of renting rather than owning, a decision that’s allowed me to live and work in different parts of the country. Of course, after eight-plus years, which is the longest I’ve spent at the same address in the past thirty years, I’d gotten comfortable. Too comfortable, maybe. Fortunately, the last few weeks have shown me that unlike signing a lease, paying a security deposit, or filling out change-of-address forms, considering “location” can, in fact, bring home its nature and import.
From the small brick patio off the back porch, I now have a long view eastward over a broad grass lot and the two lanes of Route 487 that carry commuters, rapping pickups, eighteen-wheelers, and roaring chopped-out motorcycles over the long bridge linking Bloomsburg and Catawissa Township. On the east side of 487 is the small airport, where a red-and-white single-engine plane sets on the tarmac and an orange windsock sags above a flat-roofed building. Beyond that, up the broad, flat expanse of the river valley, plumes of steam rise from two towers of the nuclear power plant near Berwick, nineteen miles away.
On clear mornings when a thin haze hangs between the hills and over the water, orange sunlight sifts through the limbs of a sprawling locust along Fort McClure Boulevard, the narrow asphalt street that intersects 487 and runs between the river and the cedars on the edge of my backyard. Around dawn, when I sit inside the narrow back porch and sip coffee, horizontal sunlight sprawls across the brick patio like a throw rug, and I watch my new neighbors. A chipmunk scampers the length of the timber bordering the patio and then abruptly stops in shadow; sitting upright on his haunches, he chews something clutched between his small front paws. At the top of a cedar, a catbird — the mockingbird’s black-capped cousin — yodels, clicks, and croons. The hoarse, broken screech of a juvenile red-tailed hawk carries over the roof from the dead limb where yesterday I saw him perched amid the frantic alarm of robins and blackbirds. Now, a fisherman’s motorboat whines upstream, the bow thumping on the light chop, and a great blue heron lifts off the shore, his beak, head, and neck a smooth S, his long legs trailing behind as he rises above the trees.
Near midmorning, a locomotive growls east on the tracks tracing the south bank of the river, its deep diesel voice slowly giving way to the grind and rumble of the cars’ steel wheels, rattling like wrenches in a dropped toolbox. And just outside my backdoor and strung between the porch and one of the cedars, a spider web the size of a potholder billows in a breath of July air. Like the bothered robins and catbird, the quick chipmunk, and drivers on 487, the spider has a home: the locus of his web from which fourteen threads radiate outward and are connected by the strands encircling him and laddering to the edge.
Etymologically, a spider is a “spinner,” and where he waits—the locus—is Latin for “place,” the origin of the words “local” and “location.” Locus also provides the first half of the name of the engine rumbling along the river — the locomotive — because place or location changes with the train’s motion. Languages also change and have lives of their own; thus, the Latin word locus eventually gave birth to the French lieu, which gives us the expression “in lieu of,” meaning “in place of.” Even the compound word “lieutenant” names someone — a “tenant” — who holds the place, or lieu, of someone else, usually another more senior officer. I like to think this suggests that a renter or tenant like me actually has some rank (though I always imagined myself a captain, not a lieutenant).
Of course, tenancy requires the ability not only to relocate but also to make a new location a home. Often the first thing people do to make a place familiar — which means literally, to make it of the family — is assign or learn names. Take Bloomsburg, for instance. Like the names of other cities and towns — Fredericksburg, Pittsburgh, Edinburg, Lynchburg, Mechanicsburg, Heidelberg, Newburgh, and even Gainesboro — “Bloomsburg” contains the suffix –burg, which, like -berg or -burgh or -boro, comes from the Germanic word burg, meaning “castle” or “stronghold.” Over the centuries its original meaning has changed, of course, first to “fortified town” and now simply to “town,” but subconsciously we still seem to sense that the word implies safety and shelter. The name of a significant person often precedes this common ending, a pattern that also provides tenants either with minor bragging rights or some psychological comfort that they’re part of the history initiated by the person for whom the town is named. Just as Bloomsburg was named after Northumberland County commissioner Samuel Bloom, Pittsburgh was named after British statesman William Pitt and Mechanicsburg, PA, after the mechanics that built and repaired Conestoga wagons in the early 1800s.
Similarly, the names of many towns that start with a person’s name end with –ville, meaning “village,” such as Gainesville, Fayetteville, Hughesville, Kerrville, and Knoxville, or with the more obvious –town, as in Allentown, Georgetown, and Robstown, or its shortened version -ton, as in Galveston, Crookston, Burlington, and Charleston. And still other more utilitarian names specify a purpose or geographic characteristic, such as the suffix -port, which usually refers to its function as a harbor on a body of water, for example, Rockport, Freeport, Gulfport, and Kennebunkport, or –ford, which recognizes a place to cross or ford a river: Munford, Rushford, Rockford, Oxford, and Hartford. I have no intentions of explaining all this to my new neighbors. It’s just that familia-rizing myself with names and their connections to local history makes the place feel a bit more like home.
One evening a couple of weeks after I moved in, I sat on the patio with a biography of Henry David Thoreau open on my lap. Slowly, dusk settled on the ground, crept over the timbers and around the legs of my chair, enveloped the words, and so darkened the description of Henry’s short stint teaching school that it forced me to stop reading and look up. There beneath the cedars and drifting out of the grass, soft greenish-yellow lights flashed like cardboard matches struck from a book. First one. Then another. And another. I looked down the street and below the dark locust and silhouetted trees along the river on the other side of Fort McClure Boulevard. There, dozens of fireflies glittered like streetlights twinkling in a distant city whose name I didn’t yet know but where the tenants’ enlightening language might one day call me home.
