Is This Real, Or Just Some Trickery Of The Heart?

All the time you hear the stories of people who decide they want to move somewhere - and sometimes people who do - just because of a vacation. Every once in awhile there's this teeny tiny squeaky little voice deep in my head which says, "Am I crazy?" "Am I running from something?" "Do I think just being in Burlington will fix everything I'm unhappy with in my life?"

Honestly, I'm glad for that little voice. It reminds me although this journey may have begun as a child's daydream, it has become so much more. It's true, I am far happier when I'm strolling Malletts Bay or Church Street, or scrambling on the rocks at Smuggler's Notch, or discovering a new favorite restaurant... and yes, those are also symptoms of *ahem*, a vacation. However, when I long for other places of vacations past (New Orleans, Destin, Mykonos, Anchorage, Niagara (SO gorgeous this time of year!), the outer banks, Alexandria/DC, etc) none of these places feel quite the same. I think as a kid I saw Burlington as a second home because my dad's parents lived on College Ave and most of my mom's family lived within 15 minutes of our house in Columbus, Ohio. I'm not sure when that translated in a deep-seated feeling of HOME - almost like a quiet, reserved corner of my heart, and when I stumbled onto the realization that when I'm anywhere else I feel just slightly out of place, I just know what my heart tells me.

Growing up, I only had one grandfather - my mom's dad died when she was two so dad's dad - never short of a Velamint, with the papery skin, and a perpetual twinkle of laughter and mischief in his eye was my only elderly patriarch. It was spring of my freshman year in college when I got the call he had passed and the whole family made the trek to bury him in Malletts Bay. They had moved to live with my aunt and uncle about a decade before, so we'd reached a point where none of us actually lived in Vermont anymore and it had been that long since I'd seen those hills.

I'd been to Vermont in winter before, but never spring - or I suppose not-quite-spring and it hit me hard to see those gorgeous views replaced by the stark nakedness just before new life begins to take root. Already grieving, I felt I was grieving twice over - until it was time for us to leave.

When the ferry pulled away from Charlotte and started towards New York, instinctively, I left our car and stood in the chilled air, my hair flying around my face, staring back at the shores of Vermont with tears slipping down my cheeks and one thought in my head: "When will we meet again?"

Standing on the Cliff

For the past couple weeks it's been about 5 degrees, snowy, icy, windy and blistering cold in central Ohio, so I can see how you might think I was bonkers to be pining to live somewhere it's been around -15 degrees.

I was born and raised in Columbus, OH. I moved back here after college and have lived here for the last 14 years. People who don't live here think it's a boring fly-over state with a great college football team - but they're wrong. Columbus is a fabulous city, home to fashion headquarters, galleries, amazing food - by far the best artisan ice cream you've ever tasted - one of the best zoos in the country, a truly diverse culture and a University so large it needs its own zip code. I love Columbus - and I staunchly defend it to though who cry "nothing to do!"... and yet my heart has always  laid elsewhere.

Burlington, Vermont. It's where my dad grew up, where my grandparents lived when I was young - and where I've always felt I belonged. Most kids when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they tell you that - what, nah, I told you  where. Being an artist was always written in stone for me, but the important part was that I wanted to live on the shores of Lake Champlain. 

I'd forgotten that dream until five or six years ago. We were taking a family trip to Burlington and I was giddy to watch my husband discover this place to which he'd never been. At one point, I admitted my silly childhood dreams and the fact that nowhere had ever felt quite like home in the way Vermont does to me, "So I'll start looking for jobs here then." he said without missing a beat.  I was stunned. I hadn't been serious, but like any great partnership he showed me the potential of my dreams. 

Now, so many years later it seems unreal that in perhaps 6-12 months we could be living that fantasy. On the shore? Not bloody likely, we'd need to be raking in a lot more than our modest salaries, but that detail seem so wholly unimportant right now.