Lyme, NH

I find as I'm driving back home along the highway, this slight itch to just keep going. Drive right on. Wave my exit goodbye and travel north, staying in Vermont till the very tip and perhaps even then continuing on to Canada. Who would know? I could just keep going and follow the river, follow the fluffed out leaves, the pull, the tug.

And so, today, on my day off I did it. I drove north.

Often the highway 91 north drive reminds me of Trina, of interviews with Katrin, of gallery openings, of poking around at Dartmouth as a potential student, of laughing with a pile of friends as we drove aimlessly around Trina's small town looking for both the library and her house, so we could say, "We've been to the home of Trina Schart Hyman." (Similar to those, "Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain" homes) Us doing loops in back country roads, only to have a post office worker take pity on us and point us on the way.

So today I went alone, art kit in hand, looking for some classic Vermont images to capture. Mind you, Trina did not live in Vermont, she lived in a small town in New Hampshire, right on the edge of Vermont. And off I went, pulling over with my SLR Camera to snap pictures of fences, of barns, of views that made me think of Ireland or just of something older than myself. Double fisting my digital, SLR, and sketchbooks, I abandoned my car somewhere up the road, and just walked along sketching the farmhouses, walked until I ran into the Connecticut River, the natural divide between New Hampshire and Vermont. And I thought about Trina, about this "character" I am biographing, and what it must have been like for her in this very quiet landscape. What drew her there in the first place, of all the places on earth? Is she buried here? Does she peek in on her donkey, lazily lying in the yard? What would it smell like in the mornings as she went on her walks? Ironically, this trip I was not drawn to her house, having met my quota of "seeing the famous Trina Schart Hyman's house", but enjoyed the sunny day, my pocket watercolors, the landscape that just spoke to me.

I drifted into Hanover, a place I once thought I might live for awhile, a place in which I was born (hospital for a month, not childhood) and how I always thought it would be cool and artsy, yet after spending the afternoon in the country, I was surprised to find I felt dissatisfied in the over money-ified community with sheek looking shops, people, etc. I felt drawn more towards the farmer, bending over his garden with a sun hat on, his wife, kneeling in the dirt, as I walked along towards the river. Towards the openness, the rolling spans of hills and sky. And I wonder how that fits in with the other parts of myself that I am beginning to unearth.