A bird in the airport

Is freedom in the eye of the beholder?

Artwork by Courtney Loveman, St. Croix

I’ve lived in Vermont for twenty years and one month. We left Portland, Oregon in a rented RV right before Christmas 2002 and arrived in Vermont in a blizzard a few days after New Year’s 2003. I had had a miscarriage seven months before. There were no other children. My first day of work at my new job was either January 6th or 7th, I can’t remember which it was now. The RV, the driving the wrong way — toward winter and away from a life we had loved, in a blizzard no less — had made a great story. It was the beginning after so many endings. Unlike what we learn as children through bedtime stories, it’s the beginnings and not the endings that are often the best part. But you don’t hear so much about happy beginnings or living happily ever right now.

In the nineteen winters before this one, I left Vermont only twice in the dead of winter for somewhere warmer. But with everything that’s unfolded over the past ten months as my life breaks and reforms, breaks and reforms, I realized I needed to go, to get out, as often as I reasonably could, until I can leave permanently.