Fresh out of college, with four years of Chicago city life under my belt and no job prospects in sight, I decided to pay my mother a visit. She had moved from Maryland to a little old schoolhouse in Vermont about two weeks before I graduated, and from the sound of it, the place was pretty cool. The plan was that I would stay for a week or two, and then head back to Washington, D.C., to pound the pavement looking for work. That was nearly two years ago.

Vermont has a way of sucking people in (as do its roads, which have a tendency to bury even the biggest of trucks in mud up to the wheel wells and seem to have a certain predilection for tossing out-of-state cars into the median on the Interstate during the winter). It's not an easy place to live, and no one who calls it home will tell you otherwise (all 620,000 of them). But when you leave, all you want to do is come back.

Most of the roads have no streetlights. They're also, for the most part, unpaved. More likely than not, you'll see a moose on them. You can tell what phase the moon is in by whether or not you can see that moose at night. Civil unions are legal. Most people own multiple guns. Billboards aren't allowed in the state; there's a palpable lack of advertising or pop culture influence of any kind. Wear Prada or YSL and people will look at you strangely; wear Carhartts and muck boots, and you're in uniform. Montpelier is the only state capitol in the country without a McDonald's. If you're stuck in a ditch during the winter, which is pretty likely, your neighbor will come and pull you out without you even having to call and ask. The social grapevine, or their front window, acts better than a cell phone, which is good, because in most places your phone won't get service. The entire state shares a single area code.

The rest of the country assumes that Vermont is the bluest state in the nation, which for the most part is true. But Vermont is not a reflection of "typical American liberal values;" people who come here quickly get the message that Vermonters are from Vermont first and America second. The state makes its own way of life, as people are forced to when Mother Nature sees fit to cut them off from surrounding states by dumping a steady stream of snow on them for six months.

But at the same time that the state's a haven for honestly "keepin' it real," there are issues of true concern. The lack of jobs have kids leaving the state in droves, to the point where by 2010, nearly 60 percent of the population will be of or over retirement age. Businesses in certain areas have a difficult time expanding because there's still no Web access. There is a huge veteran population here that's suffering at the hands of insufficient health care and memories too painful to say out loud. The state's infrastructure takes a severe beating every year and in places it's literally falling apart, and there's not enough money to fix it. I could go on...

It took me a long time to get here, from New York to Maryland to Chicago to D.C. and back, but I've been sufficiently sucked in (so has my Subaru). If there's an issue you want to hear about, something you want to learn about Vermont, or even recommendations for a ski trip (it'll be winter again before you know it), shoot me a note. If I don't know the answer, I know 619,999 other people in this big small town who definitely do.

Together, Vermonters always come up with something.

Rachel Feldman, 6/9/08

(To see what's been going on in Vermont for the past six months, check out Dustin Degree's work at:http://think.mtv.com/profile/ddegreevt/User/Blog/BlogView.aspx)