JULY 21, MONDAY

OWNERSHIP

Today I drove to South Asheville to the law office of Phillip C. Price and signed a number of legal papers. Immediately, my house was no longer mine. I turned over the key to the house to Danielle and Mars Landis who then signed even more papers.

The effort of moving has been occupying me for months and signing the papers, leaving the house behind, has been bittersweet. I didn’t feel this way when we left the college provided house my family lived in when our children were growing up. Something about owning the house at 140 College View Drive made it much more special, it was our house, our home. It was somehow more really ours while the college owned house wasn’t even though we lived in each of them in the same way.

But I often thought, even while in the house on College View Drive, that the land it was on was really not mine at all. I owned the deed on the land, even though I was obligated to sell it back to the college for $1300. But long before the college came along and bought the land it was the hunting ground of the native Americans living in the village beside the Swannanoa River, a place we could see from our back deck. At that point no one owned that land although it was probably considered to be the territory of the people of the village. When the first white family came over the ridge from Old Fort and settled the land, took ownership, the Cherokee lured him with his cow’s bell up into the woods on Jones Mountain and killed him. White settlers claimed ownership of the land, before that no one owned the land and before the first native Americans drifted into the Swannanoa Valley, the land, looking the same then as now, covered with the same trees and flowers, had been there unowned for eons. The feeling that I could own the land, possess the land, is a cultural convention. It comes from some deep desire to possess things so that they are mine only and no one else’s. Ownership somehow feels good or important or necessary. That is true, even of things that are so big that they become a burden. The owner of a 20 room house envies the person with a 40 room house. We still want to possess the house and own it, even when much of what we own we don’t need at all and in fact barely pay attention to, in fact we store what we own away because we can’t bear to part with it, as I am doing with the new storage locker I am filling up.