The Dog Days of August are upon us, but the heat of the summer is beginning to ease its grip on the long afternoons. Finally.
And with the changing times, your usual Yankee Notebook host is enjoying a week off doing nonagenarian things and asked me to fill in. Finest kind. Can do. However, living south of the 38th parallel (in Arkansas) I’m often reminded that having bought property I am not just a Yankee, but a damn Yankee. So, while the resentments of Reconstruction live on, this is your first edition of the Damned Yankee Notebook.
About 46 years and three weeks ago, we piled the family in the car and headed 200 miles south from the Upper Valley to drop me off at the US Coast Guard Academy. In the hustle and bustle of the time, I never understood the permanence or meaning of leaving northern New England. This sudden and violent dislocation from “home” was disorienting but began a lifetime of seeing what’s over the next rise. In the thrall of discovery with adventures all over the world it’s easy to lose track of what home means over the long arc of a lifetime.
Of course, every 18-year-old gets homesick thinking about Mom’s cooking, hunting with Dad, or even a high school girlfriend who’s already moved on. And then later, it’s harder to raise kids and share holidays without grandparents around. Even simple things like going to the grocery store require thoughtful navigation when you move around every few years. And folks talk funny. All these things are subtle, but constant reminders that you aren’t really home.
On the occasional visit to New Hampshire and Vermont, there are all the usual cues that remind you that you’re back where you first learned, well, everything.
There are a thousand little things like weirdly numbered exits on the highways, bizarrely large zucchinis, state liquor stores, small working farms, and cars with rust. There are a few major differences as well; real maple syrup at restaurants, crooked roads, cold and clear running rivers, trees everywhere, and almost no level ground. Nope. Nowhere. If you’ve got two feet on the ground in northern New England, one leg is surely bent.
And as you well know, the change of seasons north of Brattleboro is, let’s call it, noteworthy. Perhaps you’ve stood in the same spot in January and in July and reflected on the difference a 100-degree temperature change can have. It’s a lot. But these are all just things that happen around you or to you.
Certainly, that can’t be all there is to it. Home can’t just be the sum of weather, weird accents, and geography.
Perhaps home is not just the environment that you find yourself in. Maybe it has more to do with the character and relationships you have with the folks around you. If you look closely at Norman Rockwell paintings like the Town Meeting, a Boy Scout, or any of his Evening Post covers, you’ll notice they are actually about how people regard one another. Maybe Rockwell’s appeal isn’t just idyllic circumstances, but that he captured the sense of respect, interest, and even love his subjects had for one another.
Does that slightly elevated sense of the value of other people live on in New England? From what I’ve seen, ayup. For their part, my sister and her husband just see it as part of everyday life; plowing an extra driveway, dropping off a casserole, or sharing extra syrup. And they’re not weird outliers or busybodies; just regular Vermonters doing regular things. As they would say, “What else you gonna do?”
Whether attending a fundraiser in the Upper Valley, drinking coffee in Montpelier, or doing business in Burlington, I can’t get past the sense there’s just a little more thinking about “us” than “me.” This is what reminds me I’m in a different place. A place that feels just a little more like home.