Jennifer Groft

First, I need to get one thing out of the way regarding our move to Vermont.

Yes, we know it gets cold there.

The first reaction most people have when they hear we, who have lived in one of the hottest cities in the country most of our lives, are moving to Vermont is to say, “You know, it gets cold there.”

Anyway.

We fell in love with Vermont from the moment we landed in its curiously smelly little airport in Burlington. (It smelled like dog food, but that could have just been from someone actually feeding a dog nearby and the fact that it wasn’t very large, so the odor couldn’t dissipate.) Despite a long day of travel on multiple planes, we still had a two-hour drive to get to our son’s house before the journey was done.

But that drive—

It was late August, and the evening air was already a little crisp, but the grass and trees were still every shade of bright and deep green. The entire drive, after the five minutes it took us to get out of Burlington, was farms, and woods, and open spaces between. Real rivers—with water in them—snaked through the landscape. We found out later that billboards are not a thing in Vermont, which made the drive especially pristine.

Once we reached our son James’s place, we took a quick walk around their 20 acres and settled in for our stay.

The next day was Saturday and that meant Farmer’s Market Day in Derby (or maybe the Farmer’s Market was actually in Newport, I’m not actually sure.) James had made a routine of setting up in the middle of the green and playing music for the attendees.

He introduced us to the people in each of the stalls, all of whom were happy to see him and to meet his family. We bought some cupcakes and homemade mosquito repellent (which worked great, by the way!) and then ran a couple other errands with James and Artemis, his fiancee, around the town.

As we finished up in the early afternoon and turned our sights toward home, Artemis asked if we wanted to see the nearby Catholic Church. We said yes, of course, and then she said, “I think the parish is Mary, Star of the Sea.”

Jay nearly started crying right there. The chant, Ave Maris Stella, has held a special place in his heart for a long time.

Once inside, we looked around a bit and prayed a while. Then Jay asked the few other people who were there if they minded if he sang Ave Maris Stella.

While the name of a church is no reason to decide to move across the country, we felt God with us as we spent the rest of the week unwinding and discerning our future.

We looked at a few houses, even though we weren’t yet in the position to purchase one, and found out about a school that would be an excellent fit for our kids in high school.

The school is about an hour south of James’s and Artemis’s house, so that helped us to narrow down where we would like to live.

Throughout the week, we asked ourselves if we would still want to make this move if our son were to move away. Vermont has never been on our radar in the past as a place we wanted to even visit, let alone live. By the end of the week, though, we knew we would still want to move to Vermont, that James led us, there but the choice took on a life of its own after that.

Upcoming posts:
Getting Ready for the Move
The New House