Place matters. It matters a lot. What would Harry be without Hogwarts? What would Mary be without the secret garden? From Wonderland to Panem, places in books for young people matter to the characters who must find their way through the challenges places pose or make their way back to the places they call home. These fictional places also become important to readers. When you hopefully tap on the back of the closet in search of Narnia, your hope draws the place off the page and into the real world.
Even the dull, ordinary places of our everyday lives matter because we become ourselves in those places. I grew up in a small, split-level house in the DC suburbs. It is not a beautiful house, nor is it especially interesting, but I was brought home from the hospital into that house, I played there with friends I still hold dear, and I wrote my first poems and stories there. When I went off to college and was occasionally homesick, that was the house I longed to return to. When I woke up on my wedding day, I awoke in that house. I brought my children to that house when they were babies, and now they have their own relationships to the house. It has been one of the places of their becoming, too.
My mother has now moved out of that house, and I’m struck by how hard it is to say good-bye to a place. I made a final visit, and I stood in my old bedroom and looked one last time at the walls that held me for so many years. I found the old piece of tape on the ceiling that makes a shape like an airplane. I slid down the sloped wall between the staircases. I rested my hand on the solid trunk of the tree I planted in the backyard in 1981. All these were gestures of farewell.
Of course, these details of the place live in my memory, and the truth is that for a long time, they have mattered more in my head than they do in reality. The tree matters not because it is so solid, but because I remember carrying the sapling home from school on Arbor Day. That sapling has lived only in my memory for over 30 years, and the tree is just today’s manifestation of all those years of becoming. My room stopped being my room long ago, and when I think of “my room,” I picture a bedspread that’s long gone and shelves that used to be a different color and quotes on index cards taped up on the wall that turned yellow and curled and got thrown away.
The room as I remember it hasn’t existed in the real world for many years, and as I realize this, I discover there is no need to say good-bye to the places where we become ourselves. They grow into us and live in us and never leave us. Just as Wonderland and Neverland and Mowgli’s Jungle are real and vibrant many, many years after they were imagined, the house where I grew up will live always in my mind. And bits of it will show up in my books and will help my characters become themselves, and those bits will outlast even my memory. Careful readers may recognize a tree or an airplane made of tape, and they will know that wonderful, fictional places are actually and always real.