Vermont Ain't for Sissies

PROLOGUE

IT WAS ONE OF THE BEST THINGS I’ve ever done but for a long time I didn’t think so.

In 1974 my husband and I moved from Long Island to Vermont.  We put our Massapequa split-level house on the market, packed up most of our belongings and all of who we were and ran away to our vacation home in Vermont without making too many plans.

We lived there for ten years.

I was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, graduated from Baldwin High School, went to a secretarial school in New York City, and then commuted on the Long Island Railroad every day to work there.

Warren was born and grew up in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, tried out a few colleges, and somehow made his way to Baldwin where we discovered each other. 

We married after a respectable amount of time and later  bought a house in Nassau Shores, Massapequa, where we raised two daughters for a while.

We lived a life of triumphs and failures, and when our kids went off to college, one at a time, we figured we’d settle back, put our feet up and begin to take life easy.

That never happened, because if it had we never would have ended up living in Vermont. 

The thought of spending the rest of our days in suburbia doing the required suburban thing—-living in the perfect house with the perfect lawn on the perfect block—-was beginning to look unappealing.  Our child-rearing responsibilities were behind us, and as seasoned Long Islanders, we had to be in pain at least part of the time.  We didn’t plan it that way but it turned out we exchanged the pain of Long Island for the pain of Vermont.

Why did we move to Vermont?  It’s simple when you see how very Type A we were.  We’d built a vacation house there, and the idea of moving to Vermont was exciting.  We had reached the Old and Bored stage in our lives and were ready for the New and Challenging.  Aha!  How much do we know about Vermont?  Not much.  Let’s go!

Thus begins the tale of how two tall, normal-looking New-York-City-loving people just up and left the paved madness of Long Island and trekked north to the peaceful, isolated beauty of Vermont, set up housekeeping and somehow survived.  One of them even lived to tell about it.

The one who was a sissy.  Yop!  I was a tall, normal-looking sissy from Long Island.  Raised in a Swedish-American home.  Swedish.  As in Viking.  Where had my plundering and looting Viking blood gone?  Now was when I needed it.

I thought I was a toughie back there on Long Island.  But I soon found out I was nothing but a sissy when I got to Vermont, and Vermont ain’t for sissies. 

Stay tuned.