People will tell you “you can’t go home again.”

I think about that a lot. There was a quality, a weight, to the things we had decades ago. This was especially apparent in New England when LL Bean still made things in America. Maybe it sounds superficial to place so much importance on material items but the truth is the substantive nature of these good old American-made home goods rooted us in a shared cultural identity and ethos. They mattered.

I grew up in Vermont and my relatives lived mostly in coastal Massachusetts. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to recapture the weight things had in my childhood. Everything felt grounded, like it couldn’t just float away with the whims of our capricious, wounded world. Call it nostalgia, but I am actively chasing that, hunting it down.

That good old America is out there and by God we will have it again.