"I went back to Ohio," The Pretenders sang, "but my city was gone."  

Call it Marlocent, a little village in the mountains of southern New
Hampshire, just over the Vermont border.
After three years of noise, crowding, filth, ugliness and unjustifiable expense in Manhattan, I craved open space and clear air.

Moving to literally greener pastures was as simple as sending out my resume. After all, I was single, renting and easily replaced at my job.

During a round of follow-up calls, I reached the editor of Marlocent's little newspaper. Which happened to need a reporter, he said. (Later,
I'd learn this was often the case.)

At my father's suggestion, I took a "puddle jumper" plane -- roughly the size of an SUV -- to my interview.
It nearly turned my normally solid inner workings to mush. I stayed at
Marlocent's one motel, run by recent immigrants with an obvious indifference to the comfort of their guests. (If I remember, they refused to hold my luggage behind their counter while I met a friend who'd driven from Boston for lunch. Odd for the time.)

But the area's beauty proved dazzling: the bright green mountains, the actually blue sky, the old brick buildings, domed opera house, town square. I wrote my thank-you note on a relic Olivetti typewriter in the little library. Marlocent, I wrote, "has worked its charms on me."

I loved that town: my apartment with its claw-foot tub, kindly landlords and more space than a gal with few responsibilities and absolutely no furniture could fill. (All utilities included, and it had a living room!)

I arrived with only clothing, a stereo, books and a few essential kitchen items a generous friend of my mother's had given me as a send-off.
On arrival, I bought a bed, dresser, desk and filing cabinet. I sat on my bed to eat. There wasn't a chair in the place. My downstairs neighbor later surprised me with a second-hand kitchen table and chairs, delivered from a local store. (My family visited at about the same time. My mother asked, "Do you think he's in love with you?" and my little brother cracked up, as if such a thing could hardly be possible.)

I met the town's prominent people -- as well as a number of that year's presidential candidates. Every day, I got to drive on mountain roads past the farms, the hillside pastures of horses and cows and sometimes, the sculpture park, covered bridge, or old-time grocery.

You had your characters, sure: your educated and uneducated, your longtime residents, a drunk here or there. And a slow-working serial killer, I remember now, who had terrorized the region for more than 15 years.  

A one-industry town is almost always doomed. The factory that once employed thousands retained just a few hundred by the time I arrived.
Townspeople complained about Marlocent's economy. Plans were discussed, a few downtown storefronts stayed empty. Still, if the town was 20% depressed, that left 80% vitality.

When I left, it was with real sadness. I never lost my longing to return.
But I moved to Boston and met someone whose work is in the city and who doesn't like the country anyway.
I took him to Marlocent once, years ago, on a rainy weekend. He found the town run-down and ugly. I thought it would have impressed him in sunshine.

For years, I pined for Marlocent, asking friends to drive there with me, occasionally looking up home prices in the area and dreaming.

Well.

I went back for a weekend one spring. Driving along Marlocent's streets reminded me, more than anything, of Pottersville in the movie "It's A Wonderful Life." Pottersville, you may remember, is what lovely Bedford Falls would have become had George Bailey not been born. In George's vision of a world without him, Bedford Falls becomes an unwholesome industrial city, overrun with dance halls, seedy bars, pawn shops and mean-hearted, beaten-down citizens.

Marlocent seemed to have turned, in 15 years, from Bedford Falls to Pottersville. The Elk's Hall statue had faded, looking more plastic now than bronze. Downtown, dozens of empty storefronts sat beside new check-cashing emporia, tattoo parlors and pawn shops. The restaurants had gone. So had the fruit store, both specialty markets and the little grocery (now a video store). Chains, of course, had crowded in (many, I'm sure, quite appreciated).

And the people. Hardly anyone I knew still lived there. The citizens in the streets looked, by and large, as if they'd seen better days. To be sure, alcohol abuse is hardly new, especially in cold rural towns without much formal recreation. (Even during my time there, Marlocent offered so little in the way of culture, a date once took me dancing at the Howard
Johnson's two towns over.) But alcohol, drugs and joblessness were as obvious as the pasty, greasy, shuffling suspicious-looking persons making their way along the streets and hanging around the parking lot of my old apartment--now, like many of the homes I saw, unbearably run-down.

I remembered my mother's description of her father's last days: the once-imposing man now shrunken and weak. My old friend Marlocent was fading.

"What happened here?" I asked the only person I know who still lives there. Oh, it's not so bad, she answered. There are designs for many of the empty storefronts.

Maybe my memory had painted over the town's flaws. Memory can do that. So I asked my mother what she remembered of Marlocent.

"Picture-postcard New England town," she said. "Like something from Norman Rockwell. (Of course, we saw it during a blizzard.)"

Well, you know what they say about going home. I'm not sure you can't. It's just that I'm not sure you should.