As published in the East Aurora Advertiser, June 2009
No matter how much I’m in love with East Aurora, every now and again I feel the urge to hit the road and wake up somewhere new. On Memorial Day weekend I drove myself to my other favorite place to be in the world: the Monadnock region of southern New Hampshire.
I admit I felt smug leaving behind our fair village in its current dust-bowl disarray. The place I visit in New Hampshire is as rural and green as anyplace else I’ve been. There’s a lack of commercial growth in those embracing, granite strewn hills that I find as quenching as fresh lemonade. Not a road-crew, nor even a billboard to be found along the serpentining roads. Each time I go there I make the 33 mile drive to a picturesque village where a friend lives, and it takes me about an hour to arrive; there’s just no express way to get anywhere. Everything about the place beckons me to slow down and savour. It’s just a very special place.Long walks through fern-laced woods and granite boulders that make me want to stop and sit for a while, listen to the birds and the leaves rustling with the breeze, are one way I spend my solitude there. Once I encountered an elusive woodcock on a dirt road that leads to Thorndike Pond. With his tiny hunched body and his long nose pointing down to the ground, he looked like a little old man moseying along with his cane. It’s like that there for me; I experience things that are nothing short of magic. I take aimless drives through the countryside and find myself holding my breath when I turn a corner to espy a glinting blue lake, or catch a different view of the granite topped silhouette of Mount Monadnock.
I’ve made many local friends from my yearly visits there. People seem to keep their jobs: the young woman with jade-colored eyes and an ever-growing tattoo collection that works at the coffee shop in Marlborough, or the woman from New Jersey who came to run the historic inn because she loved it there so much she wanted to call it home. Every time I pack my car to leave, I get teary-eyed as I say goodbye to the grand mountain in my rearview mirror, the people I’ve come to know there, the landscape that feels like a warm embrace. It feels like leaving home.
As I drove into East Aurora on that Tuesday evening, I was saddened by the sights of our torn up Main Street. I felt like turning right around and heading back to Wyoming County to stay one more night in someplace quiet and green. Then something caught my eye; a friend I have not seen in weeks was walking her dog down Main amidst the rubble. And look! There was that couple I have seen taking their own evening walk down Main for years now. Many familiars were out and about enjoying the night despite the effort it takes to avoid the trenches and gravel dust. It struck me, what I love most about where I live; sure it’s as beautiful a spot as any on earth, but it’s the people, the ones I call my friends as well the faces I know from being here for over two decades, that make it home sweet home.