Almost 7 decades ago, my father and mother bought a small horse barn on a dirt road from my Uncle Louie and Aunt Ann who lived across the way in West Rupert, Vermont. My uncle Louie, a NYC cop, left Brooklyn during the 1940’s and moved to Vermont because he did not like the left-leaning politics of the city’s mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia.

Our property in West Rupert backed up to the Merck Forest Foundation and other than my aunt and uncle, and their dog Rover, no one else lived on that dirt road. We grew up playing in the little brook behind the barn and mostly kept busy as my parents fixed up the property and took us on trips to buy antiques. The little brook packed a lot of power, and in the winter, it would hurl large chunks of ice onto the banks of the dirt road — quite a sight. We would stop in at Sherman’s, the country store to buy store cheese from a wheel under a plastic cover that hung from the ceiling by string. I specifically remember spending one school day at the one room schoolhouse; grades 1-3 were in one half of the room, and grades 4-6 in the other. After a number of years, we sold the barn, and my parents renovated an old farmhouse not too far away in Pawlet.

We would drive to Vermont from New Jersey every weekend and in the summer would swim in the Dorset quarry and Emerald Lake and in the winters ski Bromley. We would on occasion drive to Manchester, which always impressed with its marble sidewalks and stately Equinox Hotel.

Driven by the desire to have a place to swim on our own property during the summer, my parents sold the farmhouse in Pawlet and bought another one in Clarendon about 15 miles northeast with more acreage and a pond. Like the barn, it is also on a dirt road.

Once I had my license, I would make my own trips to Vermont. After my first year in college, I moved to Manchester for the summer and worked as a waitress at the Equinox Hotel.

I try to come to our farmhouse in Clarendon as often as I can, and every time I do I feel enormously grateful for my father’s foresight, and my mother’s patience and savvy. When we lost the locust trees in the front of the farmhouse to a storm, my father and stepmother planted two sugar maples that stun every fall. My father died in March of 2013, and my mother died just this year at 97. Like her mother, my grand-mother Helen, my mother loved Vermont — especially since she was no longer required to get up at the crack of dawn in order to hit the ski slopes by 8 am regardless of the weather and ski conditions. Anything above 20 degrees was considered a warm day.

The oldest part of the farmhouse dates back to circa 1800’s. Over time the woodshed, originally a cheese factory that was brought to the farmhouse from another location, began to fall into disrepair. When we had no choice but to renovate it, it was mother who supported my brother’s vision of what to do next. The original post and beams were numbered, removed, and re-installed into a new structure and the old cheese factory has been transformed into a glass house that offers panoramic views of the pond, the fields in the distance and Taconic Mountains.

I love Vermont, its Green and Taconic Mountain ranges, the farmland, marble quarries and stone walls. After 7 decades I know every twist and turn of this part of Southern Vermont. I can’t enjoy Vermont with my parents anymore, but it is impossible not to feel their presence as I travel the same roads and visit the same places.