An aspect of your current dwelling that affects you…
(Written for a memoir writing class taught by Mary Owen at
Osher Lifelong Learning, Dartmouth College, NH – 2009)
“How does it feel to be back again?”, I asked my friend Sharon. She and her husband, Paul, were visiting after having moved South two years ago.
“It feels so real,” she replied.
I knew when she said that that she was experiencing the same feeling I always had coming back to Great Hawk Colony in Rochester, Vt. where I now live. She meant the beauty, serenity, and total peacefulness of this place in the Vermont mountains. Arriving here you have the sensation of life’s many demands falling away. Here, you can be your true self and let go of the pretenses modern life imposes.
On the road further up the mountain from where I live, and where Sharon and Paul used to live, there is a house perched on the very edge with a panorama of the Green Mountains. The owners have named their house “Magic Happens” which is exactly right. When I have been away and come back to Rochester, I take the road a few miles out of town slowly up to Gt. Hawk Colony and the mountain where I live. I inevitably experience an unburdening, almost a spiritual shift, so that what is exposed is only that which is true and real. The trees sway gently in the breeze, the birds sound their calls into the natural silence, and the occasional hawk lazily circles about. There is a total serenity of nature which seems far away from the frenzy of the outside world.
I have spent much of my life thinking about what gives a person a sense of place or a feeling of belonging somewhere. I have thought about how places I’ve lived have affected me. For most people, home is where they were born and grew up. When the expected question “where are you from?” comes up, most everyone can answer with the place name of where they were born and spent their childhood. I always feel inadequate when someone asks me, “where are you from?”. (The only place where that was not the first question asked was in Huntsville, Alabama where I once lived. The more important question there was, “what church do you belong to?” For me that was even more disconcerting.)
I was born in Santiago, Chile, and by the time I was a teenager I had spoken Spanish all my life, become fluent in Portuguese, seen the Andes Mountains, crossed the Equator countless times, experienced Christmas in the middle of hot summer, memorized all the capitals of the Argentine provinces, and could sing the Brazilian national anthem as if it were my own. The name Perón was one I knew well because of the revolution that ousted him from Argentina and resulted in a long school vacation. His name and Evita’s had to be purged from our textbooks and new ones printed before we returned to classes.
Eisenhower and Kennedy were familiar names but Janio da Silva Quadros, president of Brazil when we were there, showed up in person at one of Mother and Dad’s dinner parties while my brothers and I peeked down the stairway to watch all the excitement. As a diplomat, my father’s career took us to Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Bogotá to live until I went to college. We moved from one country to another, and each became a temporary “home”. We knew we were not there to stay. A sense of belonging to a place only came later when I was grown up, but not because I was born or grew up in a particular place.
Living abroad as a child, I wanted more than anything to be like everyone else around me. In Buenos Aires, my Argentine girlfriends at school shopped for white bride-like dresses to celebrate First Communion ceremonies. Mother explained that I couldn’t do that because we weren’t Catholic. At the São Paulo Graded School in Brazil my few American classmates were going to boarding school in the US. I begged to go too because I wanted to live in the U.S. Instead, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents in Florida where I went to a public high school. I spent my one semester there pretending I knew who Elvis Presley was and trying not to draw attention to my shirtwaist dresses in bright Matarazzo cotton prints made by Raquel, our Brazilian dressmaker who came once a week to sew our clothes.
Arriving on the Cornell College campus in Mt. Vernon, Iowa as a freshman, I was amongst classmates mostly from small midwestern towns I had never heard of. My photo was in the freshman yearbook, “Faces”, with hometown listed as Bogotá, Colombia where my parents lived then…. although temporarily, of course. In my mind, that set me apart from the beginning of my college years.
In 1969, Mother and Dad discovered Vermont and built a house at Gt. Hawk Colony in Rochester. Hawkwood, the name Mother gave our house, was where we spent vacations, while they continued their lives abroad in Saigon, Mexico City, Geneva, and eventually Washington D.C. With college behind me I went to graduate school and then to a first job in Boston.
While visiting at Hawkwood, as I often did, I began to feel a sense of belonging that I had not known anywhere before. Strangely, it felt like home, but I didn’t know exactly why. Perhaps it was living in the country close to nature, a new experience for me. Within two years I moved to Vermont where I found a job in Proctor and lived at Hawkwood with only a German Shepard for company and my neighbor, Mary Cornwall down the road. Mary was fifty years older than me, widowed, and one of the wisest women I ever knew. I wanted to be like her when I was old.
One day Mary said ,” Vermont is no place for you to settle at your age.” (I was 26 years old). You must go out in the world and experience much more of life before you will be content to come back and settle here.” A few months later, I left. It was many years before I came back to Vermont to live. It wasn’t until after marriage, having a family, and an adventurous life of living all over the world that Vermont was the place I wanted to be. I have often wished I could tell Mary Cornwall how right she was.
In the summer of 1990, Art and I drove Hayden and a friend to summer camp at Windridge in Vermont. On our way back through Rochester I had to stop and visit Hawkwood, which Mother and Dad had sold 10 years before.( It was too isolated and too wintry for the retirement they wanted, and they moved South.) As we drove up the familiar winding mountain road to Gt. Hawk Colony and stopped at the end of the driveway to Hawkwood, a sense of utter peacefulness came over me again. It was a sensation I hadn’t felt in 10 years. We bought our own house on the road above Hawkwood, a few months later and named it Hawkcrest. Though we haven’t always lived there fulltime, the sense of belonging and being at home there, has grown just as my friend Mary Cornwall predicted.
There is something very close to elemental life where I live. It is like a treasure that you are continually discovering and that goes beyond imaginable riches. Living close to nature in a place where some days the intense blue skies, the soft dark velvet backdrop of the Green Mountains, and the utter silence except for the swish of a wind gust in the trees or the call of a bird, is the realness my friend Sharon described. The kind people around me, the disregard for where I come from, how I look and what kind of a house I live in, has opened a door to my sense of belong here.
Living in this beautiful natural place in Vermont has sustained me much of my adult life.
Over the years, I have learned to let go of my feelings of not belonging because I have moved often and lived all over the world and cannot directly answer “where are you from?” If anything, my discovery of Vermont has given me a place I have learned to belong to… a place where I can be myself.
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June 2011
Today, I no longer live in Vermont. We chose to move 10 years ago to Asheville, N.C., another mountainous community with a gentler climate and easier lifestyle. It was a new chapter in our lives and a good decision.
My sense of place and belonging still rests in Vermont and always will. I can now live other places knowing that I have a place I treasure on this planet…a place I belong to.
I am comfortable now with people who ask, “where are you from?”
“I’m from Vermont,” I like to answer.
Now, every summer we go “home” to Vermont for several weeks. As we drive up the final windy road to Gt. Hawk in Rochester, I am home. I feel the realness of nature and the silence embrace me once again. This is my place of belonging and always will be.
