THE VIEW FROM HERE | Piermont, NY
09/06/26
A return to New England and then Piermont, New York — and a reminder that sometimes you have to leave a place to understand what it gave you.
THE VIEW FROM HERE — WEEKEND SERIES
Don't Take Your Own Hometown For Granted, Either
A Financial Times essay on the modern privilege of travel, and one month spent proving its point in reverse.
The Financial Times ran a piece this month by Martin Sandbu making a point worth sitting with: for most of human history, travel wasn't about discovery. It was about war, trade, or finding your way home. Only recently has it become possible to go somewhere purely to see something different. He calls it "a fundamentally humanist act."
I read it near the end of a month spent driving around my own childhood. I wasn't chasing the unfamiliar this August. I went looking for the place that made me, and it kept rearranging itself on me anyway.
Rockport started the month: two weeks in a two-hundred-year-old fisherman's house on the harbor, floors sloping every which way, a view straight through the kitchen to the Atlantic. I came here every summer as a kid and never once appreciated it. This time I did: lobster, clam chowder, cool mornings St. Pete in August doesn't have.
Old Lyme gave me a compass check: proof that leaving a place doesn't erase it, it just gives you distance to measure yourself against. Ninety minutes from Waterbury, where I grew up, and a million miles from it otherwise. I said so standing in a rented house off Main Street, camera in hand.
Essex gave me a boat, a sunset, and two St. Petersburg acquaintances who grew up twenty minutes from where I did. We never once talked real estate. Just drinks, dinner, and a sky that did most of the work.
Litchfield trained the nation's first lawyers: Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun studied law a few minutes' walk from where I was staying, on their way to becoming vice president. A few doors down, my sister raised her family in a town none of us are from. She chose it once, her daughters chose it again.
Cheshire gave me Blackie's: the same order I've gotten my whole life, hot pepper relish thick enough to need a birch beer chaser, and ten friends I've had since freshman year of high school. Three of us live within a mile of each other now, a thousand miles from where we started.
Piermont gave me an old friend's engagement, a proper French lunch in a garden, and a lesson it took six towns to teach me: the towns were never really the point.
Sandbu's argument is that travel done right unsettles what you thought you knew. Mine wasn't discovery. It was rediscovery: the place, and the people, who built me, seen from a distance I only earned by leaving. I'd like to think that counts too.
Back in St. Petersburg now. Same frame of reference. A month's worth of new evidence for why I trust it.
Jon Kelly | The Tenpenny Collection | St. Petersburg, Florida Real Estate Sales Associate | Exclusive Buyer Representation Guiding Clients to #BecomeStPete