This New England

This is by Terrence McCarthy, a former Hartford ad executive now living in North Carolina.

I might have been conceived in the state of Vermont, but I couldn't, until today, conceive of going back there.

My parents eloped to Vermont in 1946, the year before I was born. Their destination was Brattleboro, a town that gained national attention last year because, among the folks you'd be likely to run into on Main Street, were folks who were stark naked.

It's legal to walk naked down Main Street in Brattleboro. We said so long to New England late last year. There were many reason for this. So long was one of them. The winters. They are so, so long. Which may be a reason why it's legal to walk naked on Main Street in Brattleboro.

Who'd want to most of the year?

Why did my parents choose to elope to Vermont? My mother gives me the Occam's Razor answer, -- the simplest one. It was the first big town over the border from Massachusetts. Brattleboro is also where Rudyard Kipling lived for a while. Rudyard Kipling was my father's favorite writer.

Take your pick.

Eighteen years after my parents traveled north to Vermont, I traveled north to Vermont. To Northfield, home of Norwich University. The college to which I'd been accepted.

Of all the colleges in all the world, why did I walk onto that one's campus? For one thing it was a military college, the nation's oldest private military college. I'd been hoping for years to get into West Point. Norwich was the next best thing.

And I think I liked the fact that Northfield, Vermont, wasn't that far away from where I was from. It was, after all, only one state up from my native Massachusetts. All you had to do was cross one border and there you were.

On the other hand Northfield was in such an isolated spot that I could feel, when I wanted to feel this way, as if I were on another planet.

Northfield is in a valley nestled in the Green Mountains. Somewhat east of Burlington, somewhat northeast of Middlebury. Smack dab in the middle of nowhere. It seemed like a good idea at the time to be in a place like that.

I learned today that a niece, Lisa, will be getting married come November. In the town of Brandon, Vermont. The town is just a few miles from Northfield. Lisa graduated from Carleton College in 2004. Carleton is in Northfield, Minnesota, by the way.

Lisa has a master's degree from Brown University. In geology. Her concentration was planetary geology. She had an internship at NASA in Houston and worked on the team that was trying to figure out where on Mars the NASA Rover should land.

That she and her beau, Mike, picked a place in the Green Mountains to get hitched came as no big surprise. Vermont's close. As the planet Mars is. You look up and you can see Mars. You look at a map and there's Vermont. Just north of where my parents were living when they eloped.

Vermont. It's so near. And so very far away. A great place to get away from it all, and a terrific place to get married.

 Tags  Brattleboro Northfield Norwich University Terrence McCarthy Vt.

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