How can you leave Boston/New England?

I had dinner tonight with friends the Hunsakers that are leaving Boston (well, Hudson, New Hampshire but they used to live in Medford -- close enough) in a few weeks. I'm sad to see them go and they are sad to go. They love Boston and New England but a job change is taking them to Atlanta. I'm pretty sure they will always cheer for the Red Sox and have a soft spot in their hearts for New England.

While I was driving home tonight I remembered an article that is the first page of "The Ellen Patton Packet" that I give to people that are new to the area (along with a stack of brochures of places to visit/things to do and some of my New England photocards) so I retyped it.

I'm sure the Hunsakers will miss Boston, wicked bad.

Bidding Boston a fond farewell
by Bella English - Boston Globe
July 15, 1995

It was 10 years ago that I pointed my U-Haul north on I-95 from New York. My soul longed to head south but life was taking me elsewhere, to my husband’s job. I thought I was going to the end of the world.

I was. I was going to Boston, which I described to sympathetic New York friends as "the tundra."

As I unpacked boxes, I listened fondly to the radio as Mario Cuomo, my governor, gave the Harvard class-day address. Laval Wilson was school superintendent. Claus von Bulow was on trial. Doug Flutie still walked on water.

I didn’t know the difference between South Boston and the South End, and I didn’t care. It took me forever to figure out what the woman at the deli meant by "potty platta." Was it some kind of newfangled toilet?

I came north vowing to split this popcorn stand within a year. Those first few weeks I walked the streets downtown, searching for something familiar. I couldn’t believe that women my age were wearing those hideous khaki Bermudas. I found sweatshirts in June depressing. I wondered where all the black folks were.

I was stunned that people spent valuable time up to their elbows in dirt, gardening. I almost left my husband when a neighbor offered to show me how to fertilize the yard with cow manure. I almost left again, after my first New England "winter" that stretched from November to April.

Naturally, after New York I found New Englanders polite. But oh so reserved. They might tell you if your coat was on fire, but only if you asked.

And what was the big deal with Harvard, anyway? Early on I sat at an outdoor bar in Harvard Square and remarked about how Harvard Yard looked like the state hospital where my father worked and where I grew up. The student reading Spinoza nearby spit out his coffee laughing.

Oh, Boston. Like an arranged marriage, it took me a while to agree to hold hands with you, much less fall in love. But once I consummated the affair - once I gave myself up to your peculiar charms and foibles - I was a goner. One year dissolved into 10 with the ease of a Bergman film.

Gradually, I stopped going back to New York for this or that. When I was sent by the Globe to write about the heartbreaking World Series match between the Red Sox and the Mets, I actually found myself rooting for the Sox. And when I finally gave up my Madison Avenue hairdresser and started going to Fred the Hair Stylist in East Milton Square, I knew I had settled in for good. I learned to say "the Cape" and "the Vineyard" like an old-timer. I had an epiphany when my first crocus pushed its head defiantly through the crusty New England soil. Though I fought it fiercely at first, "wicked" became one of my favorite modifiers, as in "Gov. Weld is wicked goofy."

If you are a mother, you become almost umbilically attached to the place where your babies are born. My kids were born here, and no place will ever mean quite the same to me.

When I started writing this column in 1987, I concentrated on the absurdities and ironies of everyday life: the good, the bad and the ugly. The good being the ordinary folks in extraordinary circumstances, such as the school nurse who, with five sons of her own, found room for a retarded boy whose life depended on her. Or the man in Dorchester who threw himself into the line of fire to save neighborhood children during a gang shooting. Or the Holocaust survivor who goes around bearing witness before schoolchildren. Or Bill Damon, whose wife had been murdered six months earlier, leaving him with two young daughters to raise. All of you taught me so much about dignity, grace and the resilience of human nature. So many of you opened your hearts and homes to me, sharing your most private moments in a most public forum. I couldn’t do it.

Now for the bad and the ugly. (You know who you are.) I am especially grateful to certain judges, lawyers, politicians and dirtbags who kept me in copy, as I chronicled their arrogance and abuses.

Thanks, too, to you readers who took a minute out of your day to read, and then another minute to write a nice note - or call my editor screaming. To the little old lady who keeps telling me to "Be a good Jew, Bella, and tell the truth about the Holocaust": Let the record show that I am a good Unitarian, which I realize is an oxymoron. And to the reader who keeps writing to me at The Boston Globe in Quincy, you should know that The Boston Globe is in Boston.

Now, life is taking me south again, this time to Philadelphia, city of brotherly - hey, what about sisterly? - love. I’ll be the one in the khaki Bermudas. I’ll be the one on my hands and knees, fertilizing my garden with cow manure. I’ll be the one wearing the Red Sox T-shirt. Heck, I may even buy a Harvard nightshirt before I go. All I know is I’m gonna miss Boston, wicked bad.