Vermont the Beautiful

Growing up, my family took an annual vacation that fell into one of three categories:

• Out to Chicago to visit family. (My mother was a Chicago girl.)
• Down to Bass River on the Cape, renting a cottage owned by friends (Mae and Nemo) of my parents (who had more pedestrian names: Liz and Al).
• Day trips. These included a jaunt to the ocean beach (Nantasket, which was a two-fer, as it had a big amusement park or to Horse Neck Beach (more modern, so more amenities like toilets and showers but, alas, no merry-go-round or salt water taffy). A trip to a knitting mill in Fall River or Ware to buy tee-shirts in the outlet store. And a jog to someplace in New England within a couple of hours drive of Worcester. 

The only variation was in October of 1961, when, over the long Columbus Day weekend, we went to upstate New York, primarily to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But on one of those places in New England within a couple of hours drive was Vermont. Bennington, Vermont, where we saw whatever Revolutionary War/Ethan Allen stuff there was to be seen. On our way back home, I believe we went through Chester, Vermont, a town known for its lovely stone houses. Chester, Vermont was out of the way - everything in Vermont is out of the way - but my father liked to drive.

My first impressions of Vermont were very positive. Somehow, I had jockeyed for a coveted window seat, and can still see myself starting out the window as we rolled by the green rolling hills, white farmhouses, red barns, white steepled Congregational churches, and the occasional covered bridge. I loved it. Although I knew absolutely nothing about the state other than landlocked, Green Mountains, covered bridges, Ethan Allen, and Robert Frost, I fell in love with the state. (Side note: I was such a nerd, when I was in eighth grade, my "big" Christmas present was a hard-cover anthology of Frost's poems. And, yes, I still have it. Side, side note: Frost is buried in Bennington, but he was still alive when the Rogers family breezed through town.)

Naturally, I did nothing to act on this love. Not surprising, giving my life-long inability to act on anything. But there was no "I must go back". No "I'll live there someday." Nope. Just a little fondness, tucked away.

Oh, I went back a few times - skiing Killington when I was in college - and every time I loved it, a feeling I never had for neighboring New Hampshire, which in many spots doesn't look all that different than Vermont. New Hampshire: meh!

One summer, when I was in my early twenties, my sister and her husband rented a cabin on Lake Bomoseen and they invited me along. Once again, I loved Vermont.

And then I met my husband. A native Vermonter, of all things.  A native Vermonter who loathed his home state, and couldn't flee it fast enough.

We rarely went there. His only family in Vermont was his mother, and Jim and Grace didn't have all that much to do with each other. (It was mutual.) The people I considered my in-laws were Jim's Aunt Carrie and Uncle Bill. The summer after Jim's father died - Jim was eleven - Grace pretty much dumped Jim on their doorstep, and there he spent his summers through college, hanging around with his cousin Steve and working on Bill's tobacco farm in Western Massachusetts. Over the years, we spent a lot of time at Bill and Carrie's. 

So, we weren't hightailing it up to Vermont to see Grace with any regularity. In the thirty years between when I met Jim and Grace died, I think I saw her about four times. The last time, she was a few months from her death from breast cancer. During our visit - we were there with Jim's sister and her husband, and his brother - Grace asked me whether I could find a place on the Internet that had coffin kits, as she was thinking of making her own. And she asked Jim whether he'd ever been molested by a priest when he was an altar boy. (Jim's father was Irish-Catholic, his mother a rock-ribbed Yankee Protestant who had been none too happy that she'd been forced to agree to raise here kids as Papists.) Anyway, our last day with Grace was a strange one.

And although Grace was still living in the house Jim had grown up in, in Bellows Falls, Jim and I stayed (with his sister Alice and her husband Bob) in a lovely inn across the river, in New Hampshire.  (This is NOT the house Jim grew up in. I just liked the sign: Welcome to Bellows Falls: a friendly place to hang your hat. Right.)

Other than the less-than-a-handful of times we visited Grace, we mostly stayed out of Vermont. 

We did tag a visit with Grace onto the end of a trip to Burlington, Vermont, where Jim wangled us a bargain stay in the honeymoon suite of a hotel overlooking Lake Champlain. He wangled the suite by telling the clerk that we'd gotten engaged at nearby Fort Ticonderoga, where, back in the day, Ethan Allen (along with Benedict Arnold) seized the fort from the British. 

I loved Burlington. The capital Montpelier, too, where we had lunch on the way to Bellows Falls. We also went through Chester, where all those beautiful stone houses still stood. 

Other than that, we did spend a weekend with friends on the top of Stratton Mountain. Another weekend at the Grafton Inn. 

Mostly Jim couldn't stand Vermont. He grew up poor in a dysfunctional family in a poor and dysfunctional town. Enough said.

When Jim was actively dying, we did a bit of research on heading up there for a bit, as Vermont was a right-to-die state and that was appealing to Jim. Nothing came of it.

The summer after he died, I took a bit of Jim's ashes and put them on his parents' grave in the town's Catholic cemetery where Grace had somehow consented to be buried. (I did do some research on coffin kits for her, but she ended up going with ready-made.)

I spent the night in Bellows Falls, wandering around, sticking my head into the parish church where he'd been a non-molested altar boy. The highlight of that trip to BF was meeting BF native, but mostly New Hampshire guy, Carlton Fisk, the Hall of Fame catcher who'd played for the Red Sox.

That was in 2014. The last time I stepped toe in Vermont. And yet, when I think of the state, it is always fondly. 

Thus, I was taken with an article I saw last week in The Boston Globe on how the pandemic has meant something of a population and real estate boom for the state. 

The pandemic spurred as many as 5,000 additional people to spend last summer in Vermont, according to a state estimate, many of them seeking refuge from hot spots and urban congestion that made them more susceptible to the virus.
Now, many want to stay permanently, a survey shows. For a state whose population grew by only 387 residents over the five years ending in 2017, even a few thousand new arrivals would qualify as a surge.

“It’s a great thing,” said Michael Pieciak, commissioner of the state Department of Financial Regulation, which tracks the state’s pandemic response. “Vermont has had a stagnant or even a declining population for a number of years.”

...Now, business is booming for real estate agents, banks, title companies, and others with links to the housing industry. From 2019 to 2020, residential sales in Vermont to out-of-state buyers jumped from $799 million to $1.43 billion, a 79 percent increase, state officials said. Additionally, the number of out-of-state buyers increased by 38 percent, to 3,795 from 2,750.

“Are those people getting a second home? Are they getting a getaway home if something else happens? It’s certainly clear that the real estate market has been very busy,” Pieciak said. (Source: Boston Globe)

I can hear my husband laughing away. Suckers, I can hear him saying. Fools. They'll figure it out soon enough. 

That a good number of these blow-ins are blowing in from New York City would amaze him. Jim may have been a native Vermonter, but the place he most cherished on the face of the earth was NYC. It was the place Jim wanted us to retire to. It was the place we took our last trip together, five months before he died. The thought of anyone giving up New York City for Vermont would have amazed and appalled him.

But I'm kind of with an ex-New Yorker who's traded in Brooklyn and moved with her family to a pokey farm town near Burlington. What she had to say was “Oh my God, this is beautiful.” 

Tis.