My sister and I have a long distance relationship. It may be only a few hundred miles, but neither of us likes traveling since it takes us away from our “real” lives. Still, I talk to her some three hours a week which is more time than I spend with any of my local friends, and probably more than if she lived nearby. Talking to someone on the phone is like having a fiber optic cable directly to their brain, it nets some pretty salient details. Which vegetables she planted this year. The crack in her new kitchen cabinet. Her passion for blue corn chips. Why Benjamin Moore paint is better than all the rest. How to make homemade tomato soup. The wallpaper she accidentaly installed upside-down in one of her client’s bathrooms (not that anyone could tell).

My friends don’t understand why we don’t visit each other more often. I usually mumble something about work schedules because the minute people find out I don’t want to travel, I start getting these peculiar looks. After all, who wouldn’t want to hit the road with Thelma and Louise? I may be a Towanda from Fried Green Tomatoes in the movie theater, but in real life I travel only the highways of the mind. An armchair adventurer. Part of it is that I get carsick and I miss sleeping with my cat. I like my own food, my own Macintosh, and my own bed. I used to travel regularly until one day I woke up at some singing convention somewhere in the midwest, and I realized that I didn’t actually have to travel if I didn’t want to. In a culture that pumps out “on-the-road” movies yearly, not traveling is frowned upon if not deemed outright unpatriotic.

Up to today it’s all been my dirty little secret. Now that I’m out of the closet, I figure I haven’t missed much anyway. Call me grumpy if you must, but I have no urge to meet more people, particularly the far-away kind. My friendship plate is pretty full-up. This alone puts my sister up with the big leaguers. As for visiting new places, Dorothy got it right - “There’s no place like home.” The only reason to leave Vermont’s pristine green is for better clothing stores, and visiting Macy’s is always a risk for my wallet.

If clothing is no incentive to travel, what is? Friends have tried to convince me to date men from Brattleboro to Boston, but that’s been a total flop too. It probably works for people who drive around for kicks, but just think of the pressure to be witty and brilliant when a date has driven three hours to see you. One guy lived in Plattsburgh, just a hop, skip and a swim away from Burlington, but the last ferry split at 8 PM and so did he. I may be a homebody but even I don’t want to be catching up on my e-mail on a Friday night. Since I’ve never had a second date with any of the out-of-towners, my guess is that they weren’t so big on all that traveling either.

Maybe it’s a vocal minority who are actually going places, because my sister sure isn’t. Despite rational arguments and subliminal suggestions, she has so far resisted visiting, or moving to Vermont (my hidden agenda). She’s not that big on snow, she says, and besides our growing season is too short. “Well,” I say, “I’ll buy you a nice coat and put in a windowbox.” Still no dice, but you never know. I’m convinced that one day I’ll open the front door and there she’ll be, tool box in one hand and a bag of homegrown tomatoes in the other. Until then, I’ll be here in my little Hinesburg home, one hand tick-tocking the keyboard and the other scratching my cat’s ears.

Copyright February, 1999

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