I Used to Live Near Things I Rarely Did
On what I'm learning about life in my 3rd summer in the woods
There’s a thing that happens when you’ve lived somewhere long enough that you start taking it a little for granted.
Not in a bad way. In the way that means it’s yours now. The lake you drive past every single morning on the way to wherever you’re going — you still notice it, but the noticing has changed. It’s less gasp and more exhale. Mostly. There are still mornings I round a bend I’ve rounded a hundred times and lose a second to it anyway. The mountains in the background of your commute become, simply, the mountains. Present tense. Permanent fixture. Yours. But they’re still the mountains.
I’m in my third summer here as a year-round resident. And I’ve been thinking about what I would tell the version of myself from 4 years ago back in Boston about our life now. She was sitting in traffic on the way in from the suburbs, knowing there was an hour back out at the other end. Two hours a day, just gone. And she wouldn’t recognize this life or this version of us…but it’s pretty great.
I lived in cities for most of my adult life. Toronto. Santiago. Philadelphia. Boston (well, Somerville and Arlington) for fifteen years. I genuinely thought I was a city person. The occasional camping weekend mostly confirmed it — I’d come home grateful for concrete and coffee shops and the particular comfort of knowing that if I needed anything at 10pm, I could get it.
What I didn’t do, almost ever, was go to the museums or the performances or the restaurants I was supposedly staying for. Like a lot of people I know, I lived in proximity to interesting things and spent most of my time commuting to and from work, thinking about getting out of town.
We vacationed in New Hampshire. A week on a lake somewhere, a long weekend at Loon in the winter, camping in the Whites if we were feeling ambitious. And every single time, somewhere between the drive in and the drive out, I’d have the thought: what would it be like to just live here? Then I’d dismiss it as impractical and merge back onto 93 south.
COVID didn’t make me move. But it asked a question I couldn’t un-hear. Why am I here? Expensive, loud, far from anything I actually want on a Tuesday afternoon. I was working from home in a city that had stopped offering most of what I’d stayed for. The what-if feeling didn’t go away when things opened back up. It just got quieter and more settled, the way the really important feelings do.
When I finally decided to go, I went all in. That’s how I’m built.
My middle child, the one most enthusiastic about long car rides (and the one most likely to have opinions), and I spent weekends hitting open houses across an absurdly wide search radius. Eastern Vermont. Southern Maine. Pretty much all of New Hampshire. We kept coming back to the Lakes Region. It felt like home before we had any business calling it that. Beautiful and still accessible — coast in an hour, Portland or Portsmouth if you need a city fix, Logan in ninety minutes if you have to fly somewhere. When I found the house, I knew. It was the land, mostly. The sense that this could belong to my kids someday too, if they wanted it. If they adjusted from city kids to something harder to name.
We moved in late March. I thought that was late enough to miss winter.
The biggest snowstorm in a decade hit the following week. We lost power for five days.
The first two days were genuinely fun. We made pancakes on the 1930s wood-burning cookstove I had privately thought of as a charming decorative feature. We boiled water for tea on it. We played cards by the fireplace and took candles to our bedrooms and felt like pioneers. And we learned that when you lose power on a well, you lose water. We melted snow. It was instructive.
What I didn’t expect was the neighbors. People came by to check on us. Just showed up, introduced themselves, offered things. By the time the power came back on, we knew more people on our road than I’d known in fifteen years in Arlington. We felt, in some basic and important way, like we could do this. Like we had already done something.
Other things I got wrong: that food would be findable after 8pm. That GPS routing is more of a suggestion than a promise, and that access roads do technically connect two points…but in way that means my Chevy Equinox may never be the same. That everyone in town would know which house I’d bought, who had lived there for the last 100 years, had walked through during the open house out of curiosity, and had a ghost story to share about the house or the land.
Here’s what a Tuesday looks like now.
I get up early because the dogs need to go out and the chickens need feeding and there are always dishes and laundry because life is fuller now, in the way that actually feels good rather than just depleting. The kids catch the bus. I head out to wherever I’m headed — yoga class I actually attend instead of theoretically intend to, a showing, a listing appointment, a delivery for Lakes and Peaks Provisions Co. (my other small business, I contain multitudes y’all) — and I drive past at least one lake on the way. Usually more. I get peekaboo views of peaks and farms and stone walls and things that make me lose a few seconds of attention every time, even now.
I stop for coffee at one of the spots I’ve carefully mapped along various routes. I make sure I’m not on the phone through the dead zones I’ve also memorized.
I might meet my writers group, or book club, or the knitting circle that turned out to be a real thing and not just a fantasy. I might meet a friend for a drink on someone’s deck in the afternoon, which is a thing people do here, because they’re neighbors in the actual sense of the word. Not people you recognize from the school pickup line. People who have fed your animals and let you sell their Mom’s house and shoveled your driveway and sat with you through things.
Twenty minutes to water. Forty to a grocery store when I need one, which is less often than I used to. One lake minimum, every single day, just in the course of getting somewhere.
I traded a cubicle for a job that doesn’t end at 5pm, or really ever. I also traded a commute that stole two hours a day for a drive that gives something back every single time I take it.
I know what you’re doing. Half-working, half-looking at listings on some real estate site, thinking about whether this is a real idea or just a feeling you have when you’re tired.
Here’s what I’d tell you: it’s probably both, and that’s fine. The feeling doesn’t mean you’re ready. But the fact that it keeps coming back means it’s worth taking seriously.
What I couldn’t have known from the outside is that the things I thought I’d miss are mostly things I wasn’t actually taking advantage of, anyway. And the things I have now — the specific quality of a Tuesday in a place that feels more like mine every day, the friends who show up, the land, the light, the particular exhale of driving past the same lake every morning and knowing it’s home — those weren’t in any listing description I ever read.
You don’t know what your version of this looks like until you’re in it. But you can start figuring out what questions to ask.
If you’re somewhere between “I wonder” and “I’m actually thinking about this,” that’s exactly where most good conversations start.
I’m always happy to have one.
Here’s to the places that stop surprising you just enough to become home.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
Yes to all of this!!!! What a beautiful life🤗