How does a person come to love a road?
For a time I don't think I knew I was in love. It was a part of the world, and like other parts of the world it was a place where things happened. I loved or hated the things that happened, but I didn't actually blame or credit the place for the experience. But something happens in our memory--place becomes as vital, as time passes, to experience as the people involved.
As I get older, I've come to see such places as being as much a part of my life as the things that happened there. It becomes physical setting in the same way that the physical body is a setting for the emotions that go on inside of us. Are our internal experiences of being alive separable from our bodies? Are events separable from the places where they occur? I don't think so. And I think the this is why some places become "sacred" to us, for how integral they become to the story of our lives. Places become extensions of us, as much as we become extensions of places.
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