Few things make you consider your values more than having to condense 50 years of possessions down to 250 cubic feet for shipping back to the country of your birth, where you’re planning to return.
I’m thinking of Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, but now that the transatlantic movers have come and gone, I’m looking at the things I didn’t pack, the things I’m leaving behind.
If I were more sentimental, I would try to find a way to take everything; if I were less so, I would take pretty much everything to the dump. No, I’m on the cusp, asking the questions many people my age ask: What, exactly, has value? What do you believe in? What can you do with your past, your future?
I’m asking these questions in this public forum because two other questions come up that may involve you, too: Why would someone cross the Atlantic to make this city, Burlington, and this state, Vermont, his home? And why, after half a century, would he decide to leave?
I.
I arrived in Burlington on August 11, 1974, by bus from Montréal. I had just turned 21, and by absurd luck I had landed a teaching job at the University of Vermont. What really stayed with me from those first months were the sky, the houses and the snow.
For the first two weeks, every day was cloudless, the sky a deep and precise blue I had never seen in humid England. Everything — roofs, trees, cupolas — stood out against it as if etched. I spent those two weeks wandering the city by foot, attracted especially to the Hill Section — not because of its affluence but because every house was, and is, different, sporting eccentric turrets and improbable porches painted in colors I had never seen on a house, especially in England, where uniformity is a virtue. And a few months later, on New Year’s Eve, it snowed the most perfect snowfall I had ever seen, fat flakes descending in stately silence.
To me, the houses said, You can do anything here. The sky said, There will always be hope. The snow said, This is a season you have never known before. You will play indoor tennis and indoor soccer, you will go sledding with your daughters, and even though you will have to dig out your car and shovel your driveway, you will love the Vermont winter as the gift of a season you never knew existed.
II.
Sorting through the things I didn’t ship and now have to sell, give away or throw out — it’s a life review.
Even though I don’t own much clothing, it’s amazing how little of it I actually wear. Going through the closet, I find things I’ve moved from house to house for years and never even thought of wearing. How did I understand my own tastes so poorly? How did I get things so wrong?
At the other extreme, nothing has had more use than my oldest possession, the white duvet my mother gave me when I went away to college in 1973, which moved with me more than 20 times, an essential, almost transcendent object. When either of my daughters fell ill, I laid them on the couch and tucked the duvet, increasingly ragged, around them. In sixth grade, Maddy, sick all year, wrote a personal essay for school in which she said, “I lie under the white blanket, which we claim has magical healing properties.”
Now it is in the garage, used as padding when I transport my Endangered Alphabets carvings. On my workbench next to it, all my little plastic boxes of nails and screws. Every nail, every screw, is a project waiting to happen — now a project that will never happen.
III.
Someone who has never visited Burlington, or someone who has never left Burlington, has no idea how unusual a city she is. Let me give you two examples, one broad, one specific.
A city’s people make that city. Yet the city also attracts its people, and Burlington, and more broadly Vermont, attract people who attract, through a thousand activities I was glad to know were going on, even if I didn’t take part: sculpture in the woods and toy duck races on the lake, traditional musicians from Québec and women’s rockapella groups, tours of haunted houses, ax-throwing contests, crystal chakra alignment and Reiki healing, museums of everyday life and baseball games with cryptids, silos repainted as giant kaleidoscopes, political protests involving giant puppets, a chocolatier making Gay Bars and a brewer making beer infused with apricot, a film series accompanied by the odor of roasting garlic and a city clerk climbing over a chain-link fence to protest an arms maker.
But nobody would ever have known most of the things were going on but for the Vanguard Press, the state’s not-for-anything-like-a-profit news and arts weekly, the down-at-heel stepfather to Seven Days. And, frankly, it was the Vanguard that set much of my life’s course when I started working there in 1983 after UVM ritually fired all its part-time instructors.
If it hadn’t been for the Vanguard, I would never have tried journalism, which means I would never have spent the rest of my life in a spirit of exploration and inquiry. Nobody would ever have told me my writing was funny, so I would never have developed my career at National Public Radio, writing short personal essays, telling jokes, looking at my country of choice with the amused distance of the Englishman. Without these unexpected possibilities (which local papers in England would never have offered), I would have remained a precious, pretentious would-be poet and short-story writer, revolving slowly in the stale atmosphere of my own thoughts. And I would have, quite possibly, never learned to appreciate the world and its people.
All those things added up, somehow, to a belief that if something didn’t exist you could just make it happen. I started a monthly arts magazine at Vermont Public Radio; I started the Endangered Alphabets Project even though it occupied an intellectual niche nobody else knew existed. All on long hours and a zero budget, the Vermont way.
IV.
Now I’m throwing out evidence of achievement. Division I soccer championship medal. Division I soccer championship jacket. Cricket trophies. (Yes, even in Vermont.) Shelves of my own books and articles in magazines and newspapers. Various citations and commendations. I’m glad I had them, but now they can get tossed. I know who I am. I know what I’ve done. I’ve always been more interested in what I’m going to do next — an American perspective.
V.
Or is it? Well, at one point it was. What drew me to America — what made me an evangelist for America in the face of my English friends’ sarcasm and mockery — was that spirit of optimism and hope that I saw in the cloudless sky, the homes of many colors. Where did that go, that sense of endeavor and purpose?
For me, it started to ebb in the ’80s, when the country was rebranded by credit-card companies and Mercedes commercials and, well, TV evangelists as the world’s capital of debt spending. The brief flowering of a decade and a half slowed, then began to reverse.
James Watt and drilling in wilderness areas, the back-door Americanization of Rupert Murdoch, the Clarence Thomas hearings and the character assassination of Anita Hill — the tide turned with what the poet Matthew Arnold called a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” And just as Arnold predicted, more and more over the following decades we found ourselves “on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
VI.
As I was working on this essay in Muddy Waters, the Burlington coffee shop where I’ve been going to write for 30 years, a gent of roughly my age saw me writing with a pen, in a notebook — today’s new retro cool — and introduced himself. We exchanged one-paragraph life stories, and he shook his head in disgust. One of his best friends, he said, was moving back to Australia because of the political climate. “We’re driving away our best people,” he said.
VII.
The fact is, I’m not leaving Burlington, Vt.: I’m leaving America. As a 72-year-old who has to pay for his own health insurance, disaster is only one significant medical event away. As a green card holder who was once welcomed for his skills and potential contribution to the country, I may be only one expression of opinion away from deportation. And to my own astonishment, living in Cambridge, England (where I plan to move and set up my own quirky shop), seems richer in excitement and possibility than living in the country where I came, half a century ago, in search of those infusions of energy and hope.
So in the end, what I’m leaving behind is you, and I don’t feel good about that. I wish I could help. I wish I could throw a life belt off the stern of my ship as it departs, for one of you. As it is, all I can do is say, Hey, thanks for everything. I mean it. And good luck. Good luck. ➆
The author, equipped with the hair of the day, stands outside the Sewards restaurant that used to be on the corner of Main and St. Paul. He is holding what is called a Pig’s Dinner, having just discovered the American love of All You Can Eat and Then Some. Note the relative lack of trees. In the early 20th century, Burlington was almost invisible from the air under its tree cover. The rise of the automobile and the arrival of Dutch elm disease left Burlington a hot, dusty town. All the plantings since then, here and all over the city, say a lot about who we are. Who you are.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Things He Left Behind | Fifty years after making Burlington his home, British author Tim Brookes examines what it means to leave”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!