Migration
When I was first approached by the church in southern California where I spent my final nine years as a parish priest, I was in a parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, a pre-Revolutionary War town that touches Boston on its southwest corner. Ironically, there were vaudeville jokes about the two locations. A Boston dowager tells her friend that she took a trip to California last summer. "How did you get there?" her friend asks. "By way of Dedham," she explains.
We checked the map and discovered that the two are almost as far apart as two places in the continental U.S. can be. "Why it's nearly in Mexico," I remember thinking. And our first couple of years in San Diego were, as I told old Yankee friends, more like moving to another country than like moving to another part of this country. But when we had lived there nearly a decade, and I decided to retire, we found the move back to our Vermont farmhouse an even bigger wrench than we had the move west. It didn't help that we made the move in November, after the leaves had fallen and before snow made winter pretty.
Fact was, we had wrecked ourselves for New England winter. Thin blood and thin skin altered these tough old New Englanders into snow birds. We have come to love Vermont, regard it as one of the nices places on earth. Our 19th century farmhouse sits on a multi-acre pond across the road from the town burial ground. Perennial gardens, vegetable gardens, hiking, biking, lake-swimming, and visiting with family and friends who live in the east, make the warm months a pleasure.
We will go there tomorrow, on our annual migration, just in time to see the surprising yellow/green hue that turns the color of the woods just before the leaves pop. Blue birds, great blue heron, finches and pollywogs provoke some hormone in us as ancient as our species. Our most hardbound friends think we've got it backwards; they like the winter and find those of us who show up this time of year lacking in character.
My pride has given way to choosing. I vote in Vermont and pay taxes there. It is home. We bought a plot in the graveyard across the street. But when that November wind, rain and 40ยบ weather strips the trees and assaults our bones, we'll swallow our pride and return to southern California to wait out the hard weather.
We checked the map and discovered that the two are almost as far apart as two places in the continental U.S. can be. "Why it's nearly in Mexico," I remember thinking. And our first couple of years in San Diego were, as I told old Yankee friends, more like moving to another country than like moving to another part of this country. But when we had lived there nearly a decade, and I decided to retire, we found the move back to our Vermont farmhouse an even bigger wrench than we had the move west. It didn't help that we made the move in November, after the leaves had fallen and before snow made winter pretty.
Fact was, we had wrecked ourselves for New England winter. Thin blood and thin skin altered these tough old New Englanders into snow birds. We have come to love Vermont, regard it as one of the nices places on earth. Our 19th century farmhouse sits on a multi-acre pond across the road from the town burial ground. Perennial gardens, vegetable gardens, hiking, biking, lake-swimming, and visiting with family and friends who live in the east, make the warm months a pleasure.
We will go there tomorrow, on our annual migration, just in time to see the surprising yellow/green hue that turns the color of the woods just before the leaves pop. Blue birds, great blue heron, finches and pollywogs provoke some hormone in us as ancient as our species. Our most hardbound friends think we've got it backwards; they like the winter and find those of us who show up this time of year lacking in character.
My pride has given way to choosing. I vote in Vermont and pay taxes there. It is home. We bought a plot in the graveyard across the street. But when that November wind, rain and 40ยบ weather strips the trees and assaults our bones, we'll swallow our pride and return to southern California to wait out the hard weather.
posted by Blayney at 1:44 PM
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