Vermont was supposed to be our retirement plan.
I was born and raised in Texas, and I spent most of my twenties around Austin. Chris and I met there, got married, bought a house, and had our first son. I always figured we’d raise our kids in Texas. Then, someday, I’d get my old house in New England.
That “someday” came a lot sooner than I expected.
A summer in Texas and an empty house in New York
I had my first baby in July, and I remember wanting to do one simple thing that might help me feel a little more like myself. I wanted to take him for a walk. But it was so hot that I could barely get out around the neighborhood. I was lonely in a way I hadn’t expected, and Chris would come home from work and talk about how much he missed being in the woods.
We’d visited Vermont in 2018, and I fell for the hiking trails and little towns pretty quickly. By the end of 2019, when the tenants in Chris’s rental near Albany were getting ready to move out, we started asking ourselves if we could go sooner. What if we moved into that house, fixed it up, and used it as a home base while we figured out where in Vermont we wanted to live?
By the end of May 2020, we’d sold our house near Austin and driven to Upstate New York with our eleven-month-old. I’d been hoping to find some community as a new mom, and we arrived to closed playgrounds, closed libraries, and no mom groups. We spent about two years there. For almost a year, our very patient Realtor, Dick Palmer, took us all over Vermont looking for a place to land.
Why we picked Bennington
I wanted a small town, some land, and a little more quiet. I also wanted my family to be able to visit from Texas without a whole extra day of travel. Bennington gave us a wooded property with a mountain view and a drive to the Albany airport I could live with. I still love the peace I feel when I come home to that little cabin.
Now we’re renovating a house built in 1907 in the village of North Bennington. And every so often I think about Baby Boom, a movie my mom and I love. I remember watching Diane Keaton’s character buy this old Vermont house that needed all kinds of work and thinking how much I wanted a life like that. I wanted to raise my kids in a small town, have a business and a creative life of my own, and know the people around me.
The part I couldn’t picture back then was everything in between. The cross-country drive with a baby. The lonely stretch in New York. The weekends spent looking at houses. Now, in the middle of another renovation, one of the things I’m most excited about is being able to walk to the library with my kids. That’s what my old-house-in-Vermont dream looks like these days, and it feels a lot more like mine.
I’m sharing more of the story on At Home with Emily Heyer, along with what it’s like to raise kids, renovate an old house, and buy or sell a home in Southern Vermont. If Vermont is on your “someday” list and you’re wondering what life here might look like for you, I’d love to hear from you.
