Becoming a Local

I am fond
of old Vermonters
the ones of few words,
craggy faces,
arid humor.
Like the one last week,
who said, after early spring
hit 80 one day
and a snowy 32 the next:
"A shorter summer than most."
I run into them
jawing with the postmistress
at the rural PO,
the nearest thing our town has
to a communal watering hole.
The old bucks ask me
how the hell I'm doing.
"Oh," I say,
"running behind myself
trying to catch up
to my own ass."
They laugh -
fine praise from them -
and toss me other
come-on lines
to see what else I'll say.
It is said
nobody from away
can ever be a Vermonter.
Depends on who you are, though.
You have to know your place.

-Peggy Whiteneck

A Comment on the Process
When my parents and I moved to Northern New England, they to the White Mountains, I to the Green, we came for the same reason a lot of other people move up here: for the rural, small town feel of it, for the beauty of the mountains and the humanizing pace of the farms. My parents and sisters and I have never had any trouble being accepted by "the locals."

But I've seen other people move up here to Vermont, then alienate the natives with a civic activism designed to maintain the newcomers' illusions about Vermont - an activism that hasn't paid its dues, accompanied by an attitude that presumes the families who have lived here for generations don't know what's best for the state or themselves. Native Vermonters hate that kind of chauvinism. I'm convinced that being a "flatlander" is more a matter of attitude than where a person came from.

This poem has some of the shortest lines I've ever written. The line breaks are meant to echo the speech rhythms of the poem's "old Vermonters of few words."