Page 7 - Marino2005

2.3, September 2005
Nebula

windows, and an hour-and-a-half to close them." That’s the kind of telling, human
detail journalists, or any writers, really, appreciate and give to their readers.

The lovely thing about Sicily is that it is FULL of such oral tradition and is such a
treasure chest of material for me. I am full of gratitude to Professor Michele
LoMonaco for teaching me Italian for the price of a sack of mackerel. Without a

knowledge of Italian, Sicily would have been an opaque mystery to me.

E.M. From the US to Italy to the US and back again, time after time … The last
question I would like to ask you concerns your idea of belonging and “home.”
Where do you really feel at home, Theresa?

T.M. Home is right here in the West River Valley of Vermont. I have often felt lucky

about knowing exactly where my home is. I don’t own a house, but I do have a home.
I have an intimate relationship with the hills and folds of this little valley, and the

good people in it.

I was not born here but often wished I was. I first came here when I was nine, on a
weekend trip with a friend of my father’s who was a New York lawyer who owned a
horse and stabled it up here. He flew up here weekends with his wife to ride and enjoy

the country. When we arrived at the airport in Massachusetts we took his old car to
Brookline, Vermont. I remember getting out of the car , walking over to the white

paddock fence, seeing horses grazing in a pasture, heads down, tails swishing, and
beyond them, soft rounded green hills, and beyond them a dark summer storm coming

our way and saying to myself, "I am going to live here." I knew it, literally, the
moment I set foot in Vermont. There is no other place I call home.

At the time, I still had to live in New Jersey with my parents. But when I was 13 the
family friends bought the inn and stable they had used for years, and asked me to

work at the inn during summers. I worked there every summer from eighth grade
through college except for the summer I worked in Paris, made friends with real

Vermonters, set down roots. When I was 17 I became an "emancipated minor" (legal
term meaning I was legally on my own and responsible for my own debts, though
underage) and took the Freeman’s Oath, which is a promise every voter in Vermont

makes, a promise to always vote for what would be best for Vermont. Later on, in my
thirties, I became the West River Valley reporter for the Brattleboro Reformer, a

Marino: …An Interview with Theresa Maggio 124