Monday, March 10, 2014

Lights in a Northern Town

There are lights in the woods in which I played.”

A long, long time ago, when I was much younger, this first line (or perhaps title) of a potential poem floated into my mind. I wrote it down, and it has sat quietly in my files ever since, a bookmark of a theme I mull over time and again.
Church Street in Burlington, VT

It was interesting enough, a bit clunky, but it was the image (and corresponding emotions) that have remained with me through the years.

The image? My woods, in Acton, Massachusetts, not really a wilderness to any extent but a lovely forest to my youthful soul, were being torn into by builders and developed into houses and yards for future tenants. Through the trees, where I had once seen only darkness and mystery, I was now able to spot less-mysterious, twinkling porch lights.

It was inevitable. Acton is only 25 miles from Boston, a tempting suburban option for the commuters who head into the city every day, and our family was only an early wave of what was to come in town, a steady stream of people buying up available land and housing.

The emotions? I guess it was an early existential crisis for me, of seeing a treasured natural playground of my early years bulldozed and taken away, and of the enduring and inexorable pace of change in the world, and of nature under attack. If my childhood forest could be sold and trashed, was anything sacred?


The pace of change ... development ... a return to places we once knew ...

This potential poem, and ideas behind it, has again floated into my mind as I returned this past weekend to Burlington, Vermont for the first time in seven years, the lakeside community in the far northeast which has constantly been rated high on all the right lists.

I've always remembered the town fondly, and enjoyed the two years that my wife and I lived there, reveling in its sense of community and artistic sense, the abundance of alternative food options (the town has a designated “hippie cooler” in its main market) and love of festivals and music, while learning to abide the long, cold winters, and gray skies that dominate the landscape from November through early April.

To its credit, as I roll and walk about town, I do not sense a great deal of tearing up and change in the area. A few new restaurants here, a nice sparkly new mural near the parking garage, and local banks swallowed up by the national banking tycoons. But all in all, the downtown remains vibrant, and people still seem to revel in their good food and sense of joi de vivre. During my few days here, I've enjoyed catching up with my good friends out and about in the city.

Burlington, Vermont is far removed from the city-state of Bangkok where I have spent the last three years ... this biggest city of a smallish state feels accessible and intimate, happy with its place in the universe and with what is there already, within a larger culture that stresses onward movement and the “next big thing.”

Bangkok, on the other hand, has always felt “on the move,” in constant motion, constantly building and developing and replacing. There are identifiable neighborhoods and landmarks but restaurants and coffee shops and other places come and go with alarming frequency. All is change within a culture that prizes tradition.

To be fair, change is not always in the places we go, but who we have become in the interim between the past and the present. The developers and construction workers tear into the places we know in the earth, but in the end we can choose our bifocals; One person's playground is another's house, and those twinkling lights can guide us home.

Thus, perhaps the bigger question is the ways in which I have changed in the seven years since I've left Burlington.

I guess I'd say I've grown a little wiser, more confident in my abilities and a little calmer and happier over the last seven years; yet I sure do feel the pain of aging a lot more than I once did. Early 40's has turned into “approaching 50” and my body seems to be rebelling.

But I come back to Burlington and feel at once at home and different, with more stories to tell, more scars, an expanded universe, and the knowledge that I am headed elsewhere, on the move back across the globe to a place I have come to know, which is now home for better or for worse.

There are lights in the woods in which I played.”

Champlain Lake Sunset
I am in some ways the same writer who scribbled that line in my journal long ago, but I am an older and wiser version of that boy who wondered at the frightening changes that were crashing into his universe. I am able to remember the forests I have roamed and hold them tightly in my heart, see the trees that remain, and imagine the lights as something else, perhaps even stars that could guide us to what could be.



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