Why New England Suits Me
I didn't grow up here. I've mentioned that before, I think, though I can't remember where. The point is that living in New England was a choice, not an inheritance, and I've had enough time now to feel confident that it was the right one. Not in a dramatic, life-changing way. More in the quiet way that a good pair of shoes is right — you don't think about it much, which is exactly the point.
The thing people always mention first is the seasons, and I understand why. There are places in the country where the weather is more or less the same year-round, and I've lived in a couple of them. They were fine. But there's something about having four genuinely distinct seasons that gives the year a structure I find useful. You know where you are in time. The light is different in October than it is in March, and not subtly — the whole character of a day changes with the month.
Fall is the obvious showpiece. I'm not going to pretend I'm above appreciating the foliage, because I'm not. Every year around mid-October I take a few long walks through the older neighborhoods near me and just look at it. The maples do most of the work — those deep reds and burnt oranges against a cold blue sky. It only lasts a couple of weeks at peak, which is part of what makes it worth paying attention to. If it lasted all year you'd stop seeing it.
But I think I actually prefer the winters, which is an unpopular opinion even among people who live here. Not the driving — nobody likes driving in it — but the quality of a real winter. The way a heavy snowfall quiets everything down. The early dark. The feeling of walking outside when it's genuinely cold and the air has that sharp, clean edge to it. I do some of my best thinking in January and February, probably because there's less reason to be anywhere other than at my desk. The short days impose a kind of discipline. You get up, you work, the light fades early, you read or putter around the house. It suits a certain temperament.
Spring here is famously unreliable — forty degrees one day, sixty-five the next, then back to forty with freezing rain — but even that has its charm after you've been through enough of them. You learn not to trust it. You keep the heavy coat accessible well into April. And when it does finally warm up for real, there's a collective exhale you can almost feel. People come outside and blink at each other like they've been underground.
Beyond the weather, what I appreciate most is the built environment. I live near enough to some older neighborhoods that I can walk through them regularly, and I do. There's a density of brick buildings here that you don't find in much of the country — old mills and municipal buildings and row houses and churches, most of them from the 1800s, some older. A lot of it is plain. Not grand architecture, not the kind of thing that shows up in coffee table books. Just solid, well-proportioned buildings made of good materials by people who expected them to last. And they have lasted, which is more than you can say for most of what gets built now.
I find that kind of permanence reassuring. Walking through a neighborhood where the buildings are a hundred and fifty years old and still in use puts things in perspective. Whatever I'm worried about on a given Tuesday probably isn't going to matter in the long run. The buildings were here before me and they'll be here after. That's a comforting thought, not a depressing one.
The libraries here are also excellent, and I don't think that gets enough attention. Even small towns tend to have good public libraries — well-maintained, well-stocked, staffed by people who clearly care about the institution. I've used library systems in other parts of the country, and the density of genuinely good libraries in New England is unusual. I spend a fair amount of time in my local branch. It's a good place to work when I need to get out of the house, and the interlibrary loan system means I can get my hands on almost anything within a week or two.
Then there's the people, or more precisely, the general social culture. New England has a reputation for being standoffish, and I suppose that's fair if you're comparing it to places where strangers strike up long conversations in grocery store lines. People here tend to be polite but not effusive. Friendly but not forward. They'll help you if you need it and leave you alone if you don't. As someone who values his privacy and doesn't enjoy small talk, I find this ideal. Nobody is going to show up at your door with a casserole and an expectation of a two-hour conversation. Your neighbors will nod and wave and mind their own business. This is sometimes described as coldness, but I experience it as respect.
There's a related quality I'd describe as modesty, though that's not quite the right word. A general disinclination toward display. People here don't tend to talk about how much things cost or where they went on vacation. There's an ethic of keeping your head down and doing your work without making a production of it. I grew up around a different culture and always felt slightly out of step with it. Here I feel like I fit, or at least like my particular brand of quietness doesn't stand out.
I also like the sense of history, which is different from the old buildings, though related. It's more about the awareness that people have been living and working in these places for a very long time. You see it in the old cemeteries, the plaques on buildings, the way certain roads follow paths laid down centuries ago. The landscape feels settled in a way that newer parts of the country don't. This isn't a judgment, but for me, it's grounding. I like knowing that the hill I walk over has been walked over by a few hundred years' worth of people before me.
None of this is to say the region is perfect. The cost of living is high. The infrastructure shows its age in ways that aren't charming — the plumbing, the wiring, the roads. Summer humidity can be miserable. And the Yankee reserve I praised a few paragraphs ago can shade into genuine insularity if you're not careful. These are real drawbacks. I just find that what I value about living here outweighs them, at least for now.
Anyway. This isn't a tourism pitch. I just find myself appreciating the place more as time goes on, and I wanted to write some of it down before the feeling became so habitual that I stopped noticing it.
— Kevin V.