By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Imagine your town was not going to last forever. If it was to be changed beyond recognition, what would you wish to salvage from the remains? If you had to leave, what would you want to take with you?
The streets with their elemental names: Rock, Water, Hill.
Ice in the gutters, blinding.
Light picking out the snow on the bushes and cars. The streets are black; the snow is not deep; it will disappear by noon. Watching, I try not to breathe, not to break this brief spell of winter.
In the early light, the snow is the same color as the sky: a cold, luminous gray-white, with a hint of blue. As dawn slowly becomes day, the objects brighter and more distinct, the harmony of sky and snow goes on, until both are a brilliant white.
Clouds in patches, bluish, smoky, ivory, arranged in a pattern as if an artist has painted uneven puffy curves across a canvas, each one frayed in places as if roughened by a faint imprint of horsehair, a trace of the passage of the brush.
Kids fishing in the pond at Purcell Park.
Graffiti on a bridge: Homesick.
Cornflowers in the cracks of the curb along Dogwood Street.
Glancing at a window, looking straight through the house to the mountains beyond (John Casteen: my Blue Ridge, collapsing into creamy hayfields).
Walking through the cemetery, like a metaphor of passing through life, and the beautiful blooming pink dogwood, feathery, standing among the graves in the silence, and the wind, incredibly soft, humid, neutral, neither too warm nor too cool: the temperature of human skin.
The deep green summer grass, the deep green trees, the blue-gray sky that follows several days of rain with more to come.
Complete cloud cover. The low house on the corner under big overarching trees, with its collection of worn, seedy porch furniture. A cushion thrown down for the dog to lie on.
A stone statue of a woman against the darkness of an open garage door, surrounded by nodding, peach-colored roses.
Serene full moon in a dark blue sky, sending out four delicate streams of ghostly light in the shape of a cross. Not a breath of wind. Sinking behind the rooftops, the moon looks yellower, cut by telephone wires. And when it slides behind a pole, the air having changed from a blue darkness to a blue light that shows up the shabbiness of the house across the street, the silent contented shut-eyed somehow perfect shabbiness of that peeling house, as serene as the moon itself—then you can tell that the moon, golden now and without its ghostly cross, pure yellow gold like a coin, is not sinking straight down but sailing in a gentle arc across the sky.
In that deep blue sky, now a warmer blue with a lilac softness, the moon appears huge, with a precise unbroken edge. A light you can gaze at, contemplate without blinking. Such benign and mesmerizing radiance—as if made for the human eye. Now the great gilded boat is sinking, still so bright, a sparkling jewel, though day is filling the street. Don’t go, moon!
An evening in late July. Fireflies wink from the Queen Anne’s lace along the road.
Three perfectly motionless rabbits, turned sideways, watching me—small, young rabbits under the streetlamp.
Parchment-colored rocks in the dry creek bed at Hillendale Park.
The moment before a storm. The crackling air: like breathing cinders.
The houses painted different colors, sometimes quirky ones—aqua, purple. A bright orange door. A feeling of amateur art. (In a local paper from 1924, the jubilant capital letters: We Do Not Know of Another Community in the South Where So Many Homes Are Painted.)
Rocking chairs on a porch. A china dog with its head on its paws.
The startling, alien outline of a tree branch wrapped in massive cobwebs—great skeins of thread encasing the leaves like a net.
A strange night sky, almost completely white. Looking north up the street, it’s dark, but to the south it’s all white, as if the clouds are somehow lighting up the sky, which glows blue between them—dark blue, but still blue. Streetlights? Factory? Moon? Why is it so light out?
Rose of Sharon. Flowering gourd.
The black maple. Its deep maroon.
A little white church at the bottom of a hill.
The sleepy morning streets. No sound except when a school bus passes.
Tin roofs. Scarlet flash of a cardinal’s wing.
In the post-rain, pre-rain sky, a line of cloud all along the mountains, stroked back in the same direction like combed fleece. The whiteness diffuses into spots, drawn up into the murky sky above the ridge, the mountains to the left sinking down into a sea of white wool, while on the right Massanutten stands up sharp, prominent, dark, surrounded by a glistening ruff like the rings of Saturn.
Weekend parties for Labor Day. Cars parked on the grass.
A stained-glass window with a circular pattern.
Rumor of an escaped goat on my street. All the kids out looking for the goat that got away from the livestock auction. There is already a neighborhood plan: someone’s sister-in-law has a farm in the country. The goat will be captured and smuggled to safety.
Interiors. A colored lampshade in a window. Books.
The sky, very dark, greenish, almost turquoise, and the dainty clouds stitched on with a little floss, a color I can’t isolate—I imagine it as white, but I think it’s really more of a gray, light gray (all the missed opportunities for photographs).
Mullioned windows. Ivy.
People playing music on a porch: guitar, fiddle, banjo, and bass.
A crisp wind sweeping away the stink of the factory.
The railroad track pursuing its mysterious way through town, receding into the distance, going there.
Snow again: a few flakes. A damp white sky, the mountains hidden behind the haze, and the purplish trees like charcoal smudges.
Hiss of the sleet in magnolia leaves.
The street, slick with moisture, reflecting the gleam of the living-room window. Porch light. Home.
