Last weekend was Den’s birthday. We drove up to Vermont to visit his friend Merry in Middlebury, but spent most of the weekend in Burlington. I can’t believe it’s been 7 years since I’ve been back to Burlington! Den humored me as I scampered up and down Church Street in the cold, making detours on Cherry, Bank, College and Main Street, revisiting all my favorite haunts from my college days. Had to get sweet potato fries and an apple crumble with Ben & Jerry’s and cheddar cheese at the Vermont Pub and Brewery. Gone was my favorite Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, but the Vermont Smoked Porter wasn’t a bad substitute. Paid a visit to Speeder & Earl’s for a Clockwork Orange (espresso and hot chocolate with orange peel and almond Torani syrup). Visited Old Gold – the best vintage shop EVER, where I got my Schott leather jacket that my parents spent years trying to get rid of (unsuccessfully). Had Dim Sum at my beloved Five Spice Café, where Den watched with glee as the waitstaff sang Happy Birthday to the wrong table (we set them straight in time to rescue our cake). Then we returned to Five Spice again for dinner because I couldn’t leave Burlington without having their Pad Thai and Jerry’s special red snapper, which is now tilapia because snapper is being over-fished, but which is still every bit as good as I remember.
Stopped in at Ecco because it had been Beth’s favorite dress shop back before we moved to London. She had fallen in love with a white silk dress that she nearly bought with the justification that she could get married in it someday. Now, some 5 boyfriends later, she is getting married and I couldn’t resist peeking in to see whether, against all odds, the dress might still be there. Of course it wasn’t. I also have an Ecco dress with a story, a slinky black evening gown that Jay had bought for me as part of a surprise graduation present to wear to Phantom of the Opera in New York, not quite realizing in his provincial Vermont way that nobody really wears evening gowns to see Broadway shows. Wandered into Pier 1 – one of the very, very few remaining privately owned franchise stores (most are corporate owned now) – where I worked my last few months in Burlington, in addition to waiting tables, trying to save enough money to make my way to London in some semblance of style (all that money was gone within 2 weeks of London). Frank, the owner, greeted us but, not surprisingly, didn’t remember me.
Acquainted Den with Pure Pop, to see whether Burlington would pass muster in his eyes, measured by the quality of its indy record store. It did. Whiled away an hour in Bennington Potters, where Merry became determined to buy a banged up antique couch that wasn’t for sale.
Den bought Merry a book from The Crow, where I learned the fate of Chassman & Bem – a locally owned bookstore that had been a fixture on Church Street – like so many other small quaint and quirky bookstores, they were driven out by the behemoth, packed up and left as soon as they heard Border’s was coming to townz. Goddam Borders! I swear I’ll never buy a book at Borders again.
The Origanum health food store is gone from Main Street, replaced by a new Onion River Co-op. But the new co-op is fabulous so we don’t have any hard feelings there (plus Den found a bottle of blueberry wine, which is huge in satisfying Den’s unquenchable craving for blueberries). Vermont Pasta Company, the first restaurant I ate at in Burlington when my parents drove me up for college, is also gone, replaced by something called SmokeJack’s. And Sweet Tomatoes has strangely become Three Tomatoes.
In addition to the despised Borders, an Old Navy moved in (to where Woolworth’s used to be) along with the usual mall suspects of JCrew, Pottery Barn, etc. And of course there’s a Starbucks now. But Muddy Waters is still thriving on Main Street – all that a perfect coffeehouse should be, with it’s rustic décor, comfy chairs and couches, shelves of books for the borrowing, and even a few beers on tap – and of course we spent more than a couple hours there contentedly lounging with our newspapers and coffee. And Sweetwaters is still there, and Nectar’s – of course – and The Daily Planet, and Ken’s Pizza, and the Church Street Tavern and Leunigs (where I promised Den blueberry pancakes, but they weren’t serving breakfast when we went in, so we had pancakes and omelets and hot chocolate at the iconic Henry’s Diner instead).
We didn’t have time for dinner at Trattoria Delia, which had been my favorite restaurant whenever my parents came to visit, since as a student I couldn’t otherwise afford it. I’ll have to return with my parents sometime, so my mom can have her favorite Pond-Fed Swordfish. There’s a story behind that. My mother, who with every year becomes more of a pain-in-the-ass to take to restaurants, couldn’t find a single thing she wanted to eat on this incredible Italian menu, what with her worries about dioxin and fat and pesticides and hormones and mercury. The mercury was at the top of her most vocal concerns that particular evening, because she really wanted the fish, but… and so, without even so much as cracking a smile, the waitress reassured her that there was no need to worry about mercury in the fish because this particular variety was pond-fed swordfish. At which my mother instantly brightened and said, “wonderful! I’ll have the swordfish,” happily oblivious as my father and I snickered and cajoled. Seldom do we go to a restaurant as a family that the pond-fed swordfish incident isn’t brought up.
The whole time I’ve been in Boston I’ve ached to get back to Burlington, but somehow the opportunity just never presented itself. And I fretted over how they always say “you can never go home again” – I don’t know anyone in Burlington anymore (even Jay has moved away, and I long ago lost contact with him anyway), nor am I even the same person I was when I last lived there. And I guess it’s true that you can’t go home again, in that I could never return to that place in time, that old Heather still in school, still naïve of all the experiences and travels and heartaches that I’ve come to embody these last 7, 10, 12 years. But there’s something so exquisitely comforting about returning to a place that once was home, and that has been long cherished as a memory, to find that you can suddenly reach out and touch it. In all the places I’ve lived, only two cities have ever really felt like home – in that way that you can leave a place and return and feel welcomed back: Burlington and Edinburgh. I haven’t been back to Edinburgh either, and it haunts me with memories so poignant it seems I could just step back into them. I’ll never be able to live in Edinburgh again, and I think that’s what prevents me from visiting – the fear that I might love it too much, because I desperately didn’t want to leave that city when my year came to an end. But I could live in Burlington again. Maybe not now – for career reasons – but someday. This is a city that speaks to my soul in a way that Boston, even Cambridge, just never has.
