Upon leaving Sicily in the summer of 1995, after some seven years living overseas,  something of an exile -- or at very least,  a chronic dislocation --  began weaving its way through my experience (though I was hardly aware of it, at the time).  Prior to leaving the US, I'd lived in a couple working-class pockets of central Pennsylvania, from which I'd been rather fundamentally uprooted, and to which I had no real cause or desire to return.  I had my sights on DC, by way of Baltimore -- neither of which had seen more than a week of me at a given time, up to that point -- and my mom promptly packed up the apartment in Acitrezza, finding her way to a significantly smaller flat in London.  Any semblance of the familiar was, by means of an awkward confluence of shifts, fully stripped from any of my available geographies, coming or going.

I didn't mourn it then, and don't know that I do now, either.  My referring to it is not to bring into relief some manner in which I was swindled out of conventional notions of home or whathaveyou.  But even in just observing my classmates that Fall, going "home" for this or that holiday -- it was well outside of what my circumstances allowed for.  When I flew to London that winter, I slept on a fold-out, in a neighborhood I didn't recognize, and with which I had no real relationship to speak of.  Granted, it was London, and I was unspeakably delighted to be there, at all.  That notwithstanding, I couldn't stake out any substantive refuge in the place, and DC ultimately was home.  I honestly had a hard time understanding why my peers hadn't similarly adopted it as such.  I could've called it an anxiety, even, around what was perhaps the fear I might be abandoned by shipmates with recourse to other places.

On our recent drive from the IAS board meeting in NYC, to Montpelier, Cindy and I got to talking (as we usually do) about books.  Her being a copyeditor by trade, and my being, well... Apparently always endeavoring to make up for the fact that I've never managed to complete any watermark academic regiment since kindergarten.  In our milieu, it's easy to forget what it means or what it feels like to be star-struck, but I noted that -- for the first time -- sitting in a room with Todd May that weekend, I was aware of the fact that he wasn't just the astute joker I know from our encounters and email banter.  Foregrounded for me was the fact that his work has actually had a rather fundamental impact on my politics, my emotional impulses around difference, and my thinking around precisely what it is we ought to be learning on the proverbial barricades.  Perhaps that had something to do with the nagging reality that he was leaving the board, and we'd thus have significantly less occasion to run into each other.  But it may just as well have been simple gratitude.  In the real world, circumstances in which individuals have the opportunity to collaborate with, or even develop a personal rapport with folks they'd have just as likely drawn or borrowed from at a distance are negligibly hard to come by.

The sentiment was not unlike what had animated a small pep-talk I'd given Cindy a year or so prior, when she was having doubts about the efficacy of her (outstanding) work and commitment around the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference.  Our culture has dispensed, almost entirely, with grassroots or amateur intellectual culture (in the sense Said expressed in a series of BBC lectures, a while back).  Go back a century, and you have Malatesta hiding out from the State, still able to engage in vibrant debate in cafes, bars, etc. or working class immigrants (Jews, Italians, Scandinavians) filling cafes and lecture halls in urban centers to discuss everything from science, to social struggle, to the arts.  Nowadays, that territory has been claimed almost full-court by the academy, and those who enjoy access to it at all get a few years to dabble (just long enough to cultivate a passion, with any luck), and are subsequently pummeled by pragmatic forces (namely crushing debt), and spit out again.  I've lost count of how many of my peers have impressive backgrounds in literature, history, philosophy, or some other discipline (even scientific), and have no residual access to the worlds in which those things circulate or evolve.    The expectation is that they'll leave it to the scarce few who can secure a living therein, and stay out of the way.  Care of Cindy's work, my highschool-dropout, dogwalker-with-a-penchant-for-dick-jokes ass was presenting alongside some of the the brightest lights in contemporary north american anarchism, and what's more is that no one was batting a lash; it was utterly unremarkable.

I suppose that, in her position, it's simple enough to lose sight of that and what an extraordinary anomaly it represents.  More to the point, it's entirely too easy to forget just what went into that; the foundations laid, the ethic cultivated, the mentorship and encouragement tirelessly given away.  I don't know exactly how far back that can be traced in this particular instance.  But I know that every time anyone's shown me the kindness of driving me past what was the old farmhouse campus of the ISE, I've felt my heart break all over again at the physical and geographic dislocation of what constitutes for me a very real intellectual and spiritual home -- one with Cindy's fingerprints all over it.  There's a certain magic to the consistency with which personalities all at once beautiful, brilliant, and gentle gravitate toward her.  The ISE served as a sort of stage upon which that could play out with some specificity; a frame for those aggregations and intersections to be physically located for more than this or that passing conversation, and where it all could be harvested and carried into unforeseeable and yet-to-be-born projects, movements, etc by younger/newer hands.  I don't know that I'll ever get over that light going out.

So, there's potentially an argument to be made that I shouldn't have been surprised at the sensations that washed over me as we crossed the bridge into Montpelier that night.  My first summer at the ISE (some seven years ago), I'd whittled away a day each weekend there, reading in a (now defunct) teahouse, with a brilliant casual lover, while waiting on laundry around the corner; recovering from probably the worst year of my life.  When the school effectively dissolved, many of the more dynamic personalities that had animated it put down roots in the capital's sleepy corners, opened a bookstore/community space, and continued to coordinate short-run intensive seminars from time to time.  In 2006, prior to starting Brighter Days, I subletted my clients, my house, and my cats to Seager, rented an apartment from Cindy's sister, and took refuge from the District's brutal summer for two months (sadly, though perhaps with some fortune, in time to honor Murray's passing).  The relatively liberatory fabric of its general culture notwithstanding (I say "relative", as even its most radical residents often take this for granted), the  unique brand of dynamism, sophistication, and rigor (coupled with a patient candor about human complexity) I've come to associate with anarchism in Montpelier (and specifically, the individuals who sustain that) not only courses -- quite evidently -- through more urban anarchist settings and projects, but has earned an unlikely regard in broader circles, for such a small, somewhat removed site.  When drawn into relief, it's perhaps intuitive that a person of my persuasion might be struck with a certain awe (well beyond romantic nostalgia) inhabiting that, however briefly.

But it's not merely a matter of my accumulated familiarity with a given locale.  Nor is it a matter of a political affinity.  Given that I never had siblings, and was raised in relative isolation from the conventions of extended family, I'm not entirely confident about laying claim to approximations of that experience... But when I imagine what adult sibling relationships might entail or feel like; when I imagine the sort of safety and suspension embedded in a return to a particular place and/or people; when I imagine what it feels like to be claimed by a geography well outside what one inhabits primarily... Again, and again, and again, I return to Montpelier.  And to the chosen family to which it offers itself up as "home".