Home

This week, Ed and I will sign the lease for another year in our apartment, a milestone really, when you consider all the moving we've done. Actually, this month marks the longest we've been anywhere since we left Boston and college behind in 2004. For three years we've spent only matters of months in a handful of different places: New Mexico, Chicago, California. More than being relieved that I don't have to pack up my life again, it feels really, really good to be staying here. I love it. I love straddling the state line between New Hampshire and Vermont and soaking in everything around me. The trees, mountains, lakes, and rivers feel like home.

The people are like me, or at least I think they are: they look like they've been outdoors, as if they like to hike and read and travel and laugh. They dress practically, not fashionably. They eat well. They do yoga, and ride bikes, and fly kites and grow gardens. They wear bare feet, and try not to move too fast.

The towns are full of stories swirling around the green, situated, naturally, at the center of every village. There are general stores on Main Streets and local shopkeepers who know your name, your family and your dog. High school kids work the registers and bemoan the boring Upper Valley, but I joke with them, and try to convince them it's really not so bad. Every town has a Farmer's Market every week, and there is music, and dancing, and community. I'm an outsider still, but I feel a part of it anyway just knowing that if I stay here long enough and stick my neck out a little bit, I'll be one of them.

There are trails and paths for snowshoeing, walking, hiking and biking. Kayak rental outfits dot the shore along two criss-crossing rivers. People ride inner tubes down mini-rapids in the summer's hottest heat. There is skiing within 10 minutes on local hills and true mountains not more than a 40-minute drive. There are festivals, and concerts, and speakers and movies at the Hop.

There are back roads to everywhere, and coffee shops still locally owned; not a Starbuck's within 50 miles. There is Dartmouth and our patterned walk down frat row, around the bend and down to the pond after dinner in town at Molly's where margaritas are two dollars and come on ice. There is local ice cream, Cabot cheese, artisans in local shops. There is art and quiet and rain and big homes with crackled paint on stately eaves. There is Sunday at home, and time enough for reading. And later on, swing dancing at Norwich town hall, summer nights, dark blue skies.

Jet Set

We offed to Florida last week to visit the fam. We read books and drank complimentary gin & tonics on planes and ate messy sandwiches at Chicago Midway, pausing only momentarily over whether a sub shop would make it worth moving back to the city. Decidedly not, but we enjoyed eating there again nonetheless.

The beach was bright white, but it rained a little every day. Nothing to complain about, though we did get caught with Grandma in tow under our caving umbrella in the maddest point of the storm on the way to dinner. That was a wet one. We sat in an air-conditioned uber-hip bistro shivering a bit and drinking frozen margaritas anyway.

Ed has new step-cousins who grew up wrangling alligators, and they talk more about hunting and chew than any kids really ever should. It's Florida, where the further north you go, the farther south you get. We escaped unscathed and only slipped into local dialect once or twice.

We drove Papa Tom's Cadillac around town and used the handicapped parking tag with discretion: only at the beach and only where there were enough handicap spots to go around. We still felt like criminals, but the short walk to the sand and some mild sun stroke made us forget quickly.

Honestly, actually, we sat under a beach umbrella and wore sunscreen and acted very responsibly. No sunburns for these two Northern snow birds. We came home only slightly toasted--golden, say--than when we'd arrived. No harm, no foul.

I purchased one over-sized woven sun hat and wore it proudly, acting twice my age and pawing through kitschy beach shops and local artisan goods stops with creative housewares along Sanibel.

We cooked tofu for Grandma, and she liked it.

Sad News

After nearly three months since we heard he was missing, we got word at work this week that they found the body of my co-worker's son. In the woods, near a pond, near his home. They haven't determined any cause of death but can say they think he's been there since he left.

It's awful, and surreal, and devastating. If there was anything I could do, I'd do it. Since there's not, I just send my heart out to Bob, his wife, his son and their whole family. This should never happen, to anyone.

P.S.

And did I mention? There's a contest every time we hold a Highway Clean-Up here at work, and it awards prizes for the most interesting or entertaining garbage found. Ladies and gentlemen, I won this year. Brace yourselves:

I found a vibrator.

I didn't bring back the evidence to prove it; nope, I tossed that sucker into my trash bag faster than a French whore. But my workmates, they believed me, bless their hearts. And for my trash-picking skill and adeptness, I won myself a nice shiny Dunkin Donuts gift card. Remember all those styrofoam cups? Yeah. I love ironic gifts.

Coffee, anyone?

Judgement Day

On Friday, I spent five hours picking up other peoples' garbage along a two-mile stretch of highway near my office, and can I just say? People are disgusting. Two other girls and I tackled one side of the road, while a team of four worked opposite us and three other groups worked along different stretches of the road. My team alone collected 26 bags of trash. Twenty-six! The entire group collected nearly a hundred and thirty.

It was food wrappers mostly, beer cans, cigarettes, and styrofoam coffee cups. Styrofoam! Seriously! Didn't that go off the list of acceptable fast-food chain behavior in the late '90s? The most heinous perpetrator of this crime was, no contest, Dunkin Donuts, whose cups littered every square foot of highway shoulder and mocked us in their anti-biodegradable stalwartness. I must admit I felt productive, removing these gems from the landscape, knowing that if I hadn't done it, they might very well have sat there in full form for the next several millennia.

As I was scrunching my face against offensive odors and dumping unidentified liquids from cans and bottles before tossing them into my bag, I made several observations and came to a few potentially prejudiced, but perhaps not inaccurate, conclusions.

First, cigarettes. Butts everywhere. Hundreds, thousands of them tossed carelessly from car windows. Second, beer cans. Not just any beer cans: Bud, Coors, Miller. Cheap beer. Gross beer. The beer of the tasteless masses. Third, fast food refuse. Boxes, cups and wrappers of inexpensive, flavorless and calorie-filled food.

If I'm beginning to paint a picture of your average litterer here, it is no mistake. As I waded through piles of garbage and wondered who on Earth thinks it's cool to toss this stuff carelessly wherever they please, I began to realize that I already had my answer.

Perhaps I'm a product of my upper middle-class upbringing. Perhaps I'm an organic-eating, yoga-loving, microbrew-drinking snob. Perhaps I shouldn't jump to conclusions, but it seems clear to me that these people littering the sides of highways and dumping their trash everywhere are different from me in many more ways than one.

Their garbage screams Low-income! Overweight! Unhealthy! Their carelessness and brazen disregard shout Uneducated! Ignorant! Classless! I imagine them, fairly or not, cruising down the road in beat-up, rusty American cars with Nascar stickers on the back window. I imagine them wearing Loony Toons sweatshirts and with bleached out roots. I imagine them with mullets, and cheap gold, and too many kids. I imagine them at the laundromat, at Wal-Mart, and at KFC.

Am I wrong? Have I gone too far? Is this a cause and effect scenario, or a vaguer corollary with multiple culprits?

What's more, who is to blame? Obviously, I blame whoever takes the liberty of treating the earth like a trash can. But who else? It seems to me there's more here than personal preference. It gets at a much larger question of institutionalized cultural attitudes. Of environmentalism, health, education and integrity as privilege.

Did I earn mine? Didn't they?