Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

When I moved to Madison 11 years ago, I noticed how pervasively the residents used landmarks when giving directions.

What's so unusual about that, you might ask?

I'll let you be the judge:

To get to (the meeting at Sue's house, for example), go down Willy Street til you see the gray building with the old white shutters -- it's just after the daycare center with the red plastic sign on the fence. Then, at the next block, turn left. Follow that street as it curves around. You'll see some tall buildings on the right, and then you'll go under an overpass. Well, it's not really an overpass, it's just the parking lot for the Convention Center, but it was built over the street. Nobody liked the idea, but they did it anyway. Then, after the overpass, you'll go over some railroad tracks. Start looking for the street with the flower garden and water fountain at the corner. You can't miss it. There's a wrought-iron bench by the fountain. It's one of my favorite places to brown bag on a work day. Well, anyway, keep going for a few blocks until you see the church on the left with the purple door. Wait, is it purple? Well, it's either purple or orange. For years it was orange (I think) and then they painted it purple .. or maybe it's the other way around, but you'll see it. Be watching, because just after the church is an alley on the right. My house is two houses after the alley. I've got some chairs on my porch and there are two trees on the left side of the sidewalk.

Now, imagine being new to town. You're standing outside the food coop and some wellmeaning person is telling you all of this. How much of it could you write down? Accurately? If you wrote it down, how many accidents would you almost have trying to read your copious notes and notice sign colors and find what turns out to be a small piece of garden statuary in a town where almost every street corner has a flower garden, and all of this while cars are whizzing by and you're trying to figure out which lane you should be in?

And did you notice that almost no street name was mentioned? Would it surprise you to know that the one street name given is a name you won't find on a map? "Willy Street" is actually Williamson Street.

After four or five or six times of politely taking down this kind of direction and then experiencing frustration and anxiety trying to figure out which of the eight gray houses has old white shutters and which daycare center has the red plastic sign, I began to say "thank you so much" after listening patiently during these discourses and then ask for the address.

Ah.... So much easier, sort of.

You see, Madison is a town (ok, a small city), built around two large lakes and two smaller ones, whose downtown is a narrow diagonal isthmus connecting the southwest and northeast sides of town that have ballooned around the two large lakes.

To the Americans native to this area (the Ho Chunk or Winnebago), it was called DeJope (four lakes) or Taychopera, "the land of the four lakes."

I've been living 20 miles east of Madison for about six years, in a little village built up around another lake, called so poetically, "Lake Ripley." I've tried to discover its native name, but I'm told that it was probably called something like "the little lake east of DeJope."

Landmarks...or in this case, watermarks. Because not only are there lakes, but also many wetlands around them. Spring in this area is a time of water birds. Geese and cranes and ducks fill the airways, and it's not unusual to see them living their lives right beside the Interstate as you drive by. They seem heedless of the noise, speed, and size of these other beings whizzing by them. It's a time when flotillas of coots dot little Lake Ripley, wood ducks chatter in the trees, and Dutchman's Breeches pop up under the oaks behind the house, soon to be followed by Virginia bluebells and wild geraniums and swamp buttercups.


It's a prolific and relatively short season. A lot of nesting and sprouting and greening happen in a big hurry. In March, spotting the first robin is a rite of spring. Talk of red-winged blackbirds is common (the males come early to scout; it's not spring until the females arrive).

March and April are heady months. Occasional warm days give relief from February's cabin fever. Folks go jacketless and short-sleeved when the temperature rises into the high 40s, walking around as if their spring clothing spelled the end of winter: a magical act.

But in the excitement of opened windows and short-sleeved walks at Picnic Point, in the course of conversations about birds and wildflowers, in the ecstacy of trips to Lake Waubesa to see the migrating whooping cranes, there arise these familiar comments:

The first year I lived here, we had 17 inches of snow in May.

On Beltane in 1994, six inches of snow topped off the daffodils in our garden.

Winter's not over yet.

It's as if we need to remind each other that we might get caught in a blizzard while out experiencing a little splendor in the grass springing green from the brown landscape, that our spring hopes are just that. The greens and pinks of today might fade again tomorrow in overcast skies and a blanket of snow.

Like most city-dwellers these days, very few of us are native Madisonians. Fewer still are the Ho Chunk among us. Yet the land and the seasons, the lakes and the wetlands still define who we are, where we live, how we navigate.

Since moving here, I've met others who had the same bewilderment/frustration at the "how you get to my house" narratives, and who came to the same conclusion: "Thanks, and can I have the street address?" Of course, we learned that not all the streets are on the map and that, in this town of squares on diagonals, even map-reading is difficult. It's hard to get a bearing on the cardinal directions when you rarely travel due east or west or north or south.

I also find, a decade later, that the way I give directions has changed. I do provide a street address, and warn folks if I'm using a street name they won't find on a map, but I also give landmarks, more and more of them as time passes (after you've made it through downtown and passed a small residential area, look for the flower garden in front of the big house on the left, then pass the ... well, you get it).

Permalink posted by Sage -- 9:11 AM.

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