Matt's P.O.V.

From the Summer 2010 Vermont Bride Magazine

Matt Duffy, a native Vermonter, spent several years living in Colorado.  It was during that time, thanks to the Internet, that Lisa (living in VT) found him after nearly 20 years.  They attended the same middle and high school, and passed each other in the halls thousands of times. 

Matt has recently moved back to Vermont to be with Lisa and take their relationship to the next level.  What were the odds that they would connect after so many years and living thousands of miles apart? 

Today Matt and Lisa are just a few miles, rather than thousands of miles apart from one another.  Vermont Bride Magazine is following their relationship through Matt’s eyes.

I’m looking out the window at the silhouette of a dark tree out of focus in the foreground of the steely cold lake. The shoreline contours and folds at natural angles with a peninsula jutting out into the middle. Far behind everything is a wall of snow-capped mountains. There is a great distance between the lake and those mountains. Today, just before sunrise, amid all these muted colors there is a plume of steam rising from the lake behind the peninsula. It’s illuminated brilliantly pink and grasping at the white of those snow-capped peaks - making the whole view look surreal and two dimensional. It’s beautiful.

It reminds me of a view of the same phenomena I once saw of a curtain of a cloud reaching up from Sterling Pond and caressing Mt Mansfield. That has me on a virtual hike around that pond with all those views - every distance seems close like you can reach out and touch the other side. Opposing mountains that you can connect with your thumb and index finger. Vibrant green dimmed sully and dark just after sunset, just before sunrise with a lone jet trail left all puffy in the sky. Circles spreading out from rising fish in the pond.  Been there many times yet every time it is a little different.  I’ve been to a lot of picturesque places yet that remains one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

It has an intangible quality that all these western vistas seem to lack. There are all these stunning movie scenes of endless ridgelines tearing at the sky. I’ve seen sunrises and sets from atop them and they are breath taking.  There are places from where you can see hundreds and hundreds of miles. Everything is exposed and should be seen by all and for the same reason makes me appreciate home.  What I’ve yet to, and never will find here is that feeling of peace in the closed in serenity of a place like Sterling Pond. Like many places in the surroundings of where I was born, it has a level of intimacy that cannot be touched by the grandeur of the west.

I used to go for hikes behind my parents’ house. Quite frequently. Sometimes with others but mostly alone I would explore and purposely leave the trails just to see what else there was.

I got lost and found my way so many times after so many hours of thwacking through thick brush, scratched all over by the prickers of dense blackberry bushes, at times ankle deep in mud that would pull my shoes off... Up and down steep gullies with streams that I’d follow to their ends in beaver ponds that interrupted the dense vegetation with wide open space... Taking breaks, sitting and watching squirrels interact.  The occasional deer bounding around and through all the obstacles so gracefully and so fast that I couldn’t see the path they took before or after - only while they were taking it.

Always startled by the wing beats of partridges no matter how often I heard them - and it was often. That occasional spot atop a rise with an opening where I got a view of the Adirondacks across Lake Champlain... which is the contrast to Colorado. Views like that extend in every direction almost every step you take from everywhere. It’s rare at best to find a brief place with enough trees to block your view. There are no fern gullies where Winter can romp unseen only leaving evidence of her activity by the path of shaking leaves.
There aren’t many leaves here at all. Occasional Aspen groves with their silver dollar sized leaves are it. That’s all. They turn various shades of yellow and then fall.  There is no variety of color like we have Lisa. And yes, I mean that in the literal sense of our surroundings and figuratively what you and I have together, between us. It is indeed a full spectrum. I don’t know what my point is, and maybe I don’t have one. Just like there isn’t always a goal or destination when you go on a hike.

Or when you fall in love.

Sometimes it’s all about the journey and just seeing where it goes.

What’s next for Matt and Lisa?  Find out in the fall issue of Vermont Bride Magazine!

Read the Spring 2010 MATT"s POV online here.

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