Home(s)

A scene from my hometown.

If all goes according to plan, and it damn well better, I'll be moving to Lappeenranta, Finland in early August of this year. I am excited and scared, but unequivocally ready. The time for equivocation passed months ago, and there is no longer a question of whether the move will take place. This is real, and I am doing this.
Before this possibility presented itself, I had no intention of moving anywhere, aside from deeper into the Berkshire mountains where I might sustain the quiet and solitude I crave. I live in northwest Connecticut, a place that acts as a sort of last vestige of beauty and silence before one hits the archetypal Connecticut (be it via route 44 or 202 or...), that soul-sucking suburb of New York City.

We are not truly Connecticut, but an autonomous entity in a relatively peaceful coalition with western Massachusetts. We have our own slang, unique even within the context of New England dialects (see: "Raggie"). We are not hicks, although some Connecticutioners and New Yorkers would dispute this. We are as well educated and diverse (which is to say, somewhat well-educated and pitifully diverse) as any rural community in the United States. Our towns are populated sparsely. Our town centers are small and lonely. In summer, the heat sizzles and in winter the snow weighs heavily on our well-being. In spring it would seem you were in Seattle, and in fall the maple trees blaze and the leaves crunch and the air nips and the apple cider is tart.

When I was a teenager, I thought this place was nothing more than a sleepy, cold, lonely bore.




Even still, I soaked in the pleasures -- of driving with the windows down, going nowhere because there would be nothing for miles, busting the silence with music and laughter, eating apples from my grandfather's orchard, smelling the ink and wood of old factories -- and with a little age and even less wisdom, I have learned to love it all.


Collinsville, not quite the northwest but not quite central.

Strangely, as different as this place is from Lappeenranta, there are notable similarities, too. I imagine that, should I become homesick, I'll retreat to the fortress area, high on a hill, where the old buildings are ever so slightly reminiscent of New England.


Lappeenranta

In a way, being raised in New England has, I'm told, prepared me to live in Finland, where people are reputedly unfriendly and as frigid as their surroundings. Personally, I find this accusation to be completely unfounded, since the Finns I know are warm and helpful and lovely. In fact, I'd say Finland is a notch or two friendlier than northwest Connecticut, where we are curmudgeonly and suspicious until we're given decent reasons to renounce that attitude. I guess it's as we've all suspected throughout history; the culture of those damn Puritans hasn't yet dissipated. Which is strange, really, because the majority of us are Irish American, Italian American, Polish American, or some combination thereof.



In any case, I'm happy to leave and sad to go. I'll miss the rolling hills, which give me palpitations these days, lagers in the grass, the vast reservoirs, wine at the picnic table while reading hyper-masculine American novels, the county fairs and the maple syrup, the dilapidated factories and the bright bar signs.