There should be a term for the feeling of finding a special, hidden (or not so hidden) place, often in a rural area, and falling in love. That love is pure of heart. That love is the kind of feeling that can fuel happy visions of the future, whether it’s moving nearby or pancake fantasies or a very specific one of having a wedding on the front porch.
I’ve had several of those places in my life: one, Elmer’s Store, in a small little hilltown (Ashfield), a half-hour away from Northampton, Massachusetts, was a hardware store-turned-general store/breakfast and meeting place with the greatest pancakes I’ve ever eaten. Pancakes I loved so much I wrote about them, achieving the highest goal with a piece - someone on Yelp went on a trip specifically due to my ravings. They were fluffy to a degree previously unseen, they took fresh maple syrup like a champ, and they never got soggy and each bite had pleasant flavor, more than just one note. Alongside some bacon that was clearly just gotten from a pig, the pancakes were sublime.
But Elmer’s was more than just good food: it was clearly a community hub. They were the center of the local film festival, the owner was the town calligrapher, they’d have hoe-downs and New Orleans-style bakes some nights. And to my soggy, Gilmore Girls besotted head, this store was like the ultimate fantasy of what Luke’s Diner was like:
The place you to go for your morning coffee, where you talk and gossip with your neighbors, where Fake New England really exists as some sort of small-town paradise. I have multiple photos of people I love cheesing in front of this building (established in 1835). I saw Ray LaMontagne there once because of course a shy, popular troubadour lives in this twee little town. He also got the pancakes.
And maybe my opinions of the place were too high, thanks to all the romanticism. That said, our last visit was a disaster. Stu and I had a car for a weekend. We hadn’t been to Ashfield in years, and we got up early to drive up there. We had looked online and it said that breakfast went to a certain hour, and then lunch. On a Saturday. We got to Elmer’s 10 minutes after breakfast ended and “lunch” started (this is after New York traffic made an easy drive an epic journey, adding on an hour), and the place was very different. Far less of a general store, a little bit of the character had left the place. It was simply a restaurant. We asked for pancakes, we were told we couldn’t have them because it was lunchtime. I tried to explain that we had driven 4 hours for pancakes, that if you want tourists to come, you may want breakfast to be longer, and we still weren’t successful. Eventually she caved, but we had to sit through her explaining what brunch was to us (she wasn’t American), and just a general vibe of hostility. And the charm I had loved for years was clearly gone.
Now, afterwards, I looked it up: they were under new ownership. We were, in fact, talking to the new owner. And while we did get the pancakes that we had driven a long time for, something innate had changed about the place. It no longer had the homey vibe of the Luke’s Diner in my head. It was the bitter-edged Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life money-grab on Netflix. When we left the restaurant, I suspected that it may end up being for the last time. (To the new owners’ credit, a peek at the Elmer’s Store website now shows a … brand new commitment to all-day breakfast, but I’m truly not sure if it’s worth the drive.)
What was interesting about this disappointment is that it had happened before. We had been lucky enough to have a lovely weekend in the Instagram-friendly Firefox Mountain House when it opened. But instead of keeping that warm, sweet, community vibe, where people could talk to each other and friendships could pop up; it very quickly became a default wedding venue. It’s hard to get a weekend there without a wedding. When we had a second weekend there, the charm and homey feeling had been replaced by something different. We felt like marks, not people, like money to be made. What almost seemed like community had fallen away to the demands of capitalism.
I don’t begrudge these places for changing. Winter is long, and money is tight. But the feeling of going someplace that was a little bit magical, only to find that the magic went away, is something diffuse and hard to put your finger on as to its exact quality. It’s something I think about when people decide to move out of the city, to Instagram their lives, to approach the country with boundless optimism and enthusiasm, at least publicly. There are a lot of realities to trying to make it through the day, and maybe falling out of love with a place is like watching a balloon lose its helium and drift onto the ground.
Links, enthusiasms, etc.:
Do you love The Secret History? Do you ever mourn the fact that there wasn’t a Secret History movie when a young Phillip Seymour Hoffman could’ve played Bunny? Then please read this brilliant Oral History of Bennington in the 1980s and learn so much about Brett Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Donna Tartt.
Lots of people are wildly over the moon about Fleabag’s second season and I have myriad feelings about it that have everything to do with growing up Catholic during the time of Spotlight and hating its treatment of mother-loss grief initially and the fact that Boo might be the stupidest character ever created? But I’m interested, arguably obsessed, in the why and the confusion of my distaste and I found this article about how women want to put Phoebe Waller-Bridge on like a jumpsuit to be pretty interesting.
Another longreads link that illustrates why Cool is Over via Reality Bites.
Question of the week: Are you ever angry? How do you express your anger? Replies will of course be kept anonymous.
Song of the week: One of my favorite Australian singer-songwriters in the game at the moment, this video brings this song to life beautifully. (This song is good to walk around to when you feel angry.)