Five Years of Being Told I'd Hate It Here

Can't believe that five years ago we drove across the country from Austin to Boston, knowing one person and having never even visited. And everybody had something to say about it.

Oh, you'll hate it. New Englanders are cold. They're rude. They don't let people in.

The general consensus was that I'd never feel at home here — that I was too much of a Texas girl, too warm, too used to people wanting to know your name before they knew anything else about you.

Maybe. But I'd spent years as a barista putting myself through grad school. I figured anyone who could survive that could handle a cold stranger or two. I'd be fine.

But quietly, I still believed them a little.

Because homesickness is a strange thing. It's not always about the place itself. I didn't miss the heat — anyone who has survived a Texas August knows better than to miss that. What I missed was the Mexican food. The comfort of knowing every road and every shortcut. The proximity to our people — family a short drive away, a community we'd spent years building. The way strangers in Texas just talk to you. The cashier who wants to know how your day is going and actually means it. The neighbor you've never formally met who waves like you're old friends. And my spots — the ones that had become mine over years of showing up. The taco place. The coffee counter. The particular table at the particular restaurant where everything felt exactly right.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted. And like most things that matter, it didn't happen in one big moment. It happened in a hundred small ones, so quiet I almost missed them.

It was the woman at our neighborhood coffee shop — the one we were always stumbling into at 6 am on a Saturday in hiking boots, still half asleep, already excited. She started asking what adventure we were off to that weekend. Not making small talk. Actually asking. Actually wanting to know.

It was the server who, on a day I showed up feeling like I wasn't good enough for anything, slid a free drink across the table without making a thing of it. Just because.

It was the server at our favorite Vietnamese spot who knew exactly what we were ordering before we sat down, but still handed us the menu anyway, like the ritual was part of the meal.

And it was the people I pass on the trail at 6 am — the same faces, week after week, in the dark and the cold and the rain. What started as a nod became a wave, and on the mornings I felt like giving up, my 6 am trail crew kept me going anyway.

And then there are the friends. The ones I didn't see coming.

The coworkers who became my people — truly, deeply, my people — the ones who showed up for the hard days and the celebrations and every ordinary Tuesday in between.

But they were just the beginning. New England kept putting me in the same rooms with the right people until I realized I needed them. The grand jury strangers. The Texans who made the same leap and understood right away. The downstairs neighbor who brought up snow brushes, because of course, the Texans upstairs hadn’t thought to buy one.

The friends from home who flew up skeptical left a little quieter — because they'd seen the life we'd built and finally understood why we weren't coming back.

And somewhere along the way, a scattered community of photographers and storytellers who inspire me to keep looking and keep shooting.

That’s when I knew things had really changed. These people didn’t show up by accident. New England kept putting me with the right people until I realized I needed them.

It was the strangers on summits who surprised me most.

There was a man I met at the top of Mt. Willard who had grown up in New Hampshire, moved to Texas, and eventually found his way back home. The reverse of my story in a lot of ways. He was sitting with his views like he'd earned every one of them. He told me, unprompted, that I would love New Hampshire once I gave it a chance. Then he gave me a list — where to eat, where to drink, what to see after the hike. A stranger, handing over the best of where he lived, just because he wanted someone else to love it too.

Vermont gave me something different entirely. We were driving through when we spotted something moving at the tree line and pulled over — maybe a little recklessly, if we're being honest. Two cars stopped behind us. Two couples climbed out onto a rural Vermont road, probably assuming something was wrong. A woman walked toward us with that cautious are-you-okay energy. She saw me pointing at the tree line. She looked. She stopped. A moose. She told us it was the first time she'd ever seen one in real life — and she'd lived in the state her whole life. We stood there together for a moment, six strangers on the side of a Vermont road, watching. Nobody needed to say anything. Some moments are just like that.

Nobody warned me about any of that.

What nobody told me was that it would turn into a never-ending adventure we didn't know we needed. Five years later, I'm still here. Still exploring. Still acting like a tourist in the place I actually live. Still finding corners of New England that make me pull over without thinking.

We didn't just find a home here. We found people. And somewhere along the way I became someone I didn't expect — braver, more curious, stopping to smell the roses. A girl who grew up in a place where it was too hot to do anything outside is now climbing mountains in the summer, picking apples in the fall, snowshoeing through the winter, and photographing every bloom in the spring.

Five years in, I finally feel like a New Englander, a Masshole if you will.

Happy five years, New England.

Love, Kim

One of my favorite photos where we went to go see the seals in Newport, Rhode Island.