Places I've Been, Places I Belong

October 7th 2021: It’s no wonder an artist picked this place to create, inspire, and reside. Saint Gaudens is a living landscape tapestry that’s easy to admire.

You're looking at the only national park site in New Hampshire. Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park is a lovely place to stroll in and out of artistic eras linked together by nature at its most well-manicured. Here, you can't tell where art begins and nature ends—it all blends so seamlessly, so peacefully. This is a healing, reflective place you can visit and feel revitalized. My mind was quieter here, and everything I think about regularly felt so far away. It was like taking a break from my own reality and getting lost in a living, breathing place of beauty.

I experienced two seasons in one day at Saint Gaudens. It was a cloudy, rainy fall day when I arrived, and within a mere hour, it was a sunny, clear-sky spring afternoon. We're just a few days from this national historic site's designation anniversary. For the past 46 years, the home, gardens, and studios of prolific sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens have been preserved and admired in quaint Cornish, New Hampshire.

The Granite State's next-door neighbor also has only one national park site—Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock, Vermont. Both of these picturesque places magically ended up along my 2021 fall New England road trip route. I didn't even know they existed till I got up there and locals recommended a visit. Of course, being the national park enthusiast and mystic I am, I was enchanted by the idea that I had unknowingly led myself to the places I love most.

Adding to the enchantment of that trip were the two perfect strangers I met along the way who could've sworn I was someone else. The first came after breakfast at a classic, chrome-trim 1950s diner shaped like an Airstream and only a little bigger than one. An older gentleman walked up to my booth smiling, "I wanted to wait till after you'd finished your breakfast, but I just had to come up and tell you that you look exactly like a girl who lives right up the hill. As soon as you walked in, I could've sworn it was you—the resemblance is just so striking." He told me she's got a big loud voice that towers over everyone in the chorus group—beautiful singer and apparently my identical twin!

Later that day, about 50 miles away, I had another mystifying encounter. As I was walking out of the visitor center with my arms and national parks passport all stamped, I held the door open for a woman who immediately appeared to recognize me. "That's you in the van down there, right? You have a van?" I replied, "No, not yet." She said, "Seriously? No, that's gotta be you. There's a girl who looks just like you down there—I could've sworn it was you."

What are the odds I'd have two encounters like this in one day? What are the odds that the woman at the visitor center spotted the girl who lives up on the hill that the man thought I looked just like? I don't know, but I loved these encounters—and like most things I experience along my journeys, I take them as signs that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. Like I followed my instincts to places I belong, and these happy experiences are almost like rewards for going my own way.

This day also reminds me of an excellent Twilight Zone episode that genuinely freaks me out every time I watch it. Season 1, Episode 21: Mirror Image. Millicent Barns finds herself butting heads with a hilarious bus depot worker who insists that she's doing things she knows she hasn't. Her suitcase moves without her moving it, the bathroom attendant says she's been in there before on her first trip in—she wonders if someone's pulling a prank on her, but when people keep telling her they've seen her before, she theorizes that her doppelgänger is there at the bus station trying to take over her life.

I won't spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen but might want to see it, but let's just say, Millicent was fearful yet bravely trying to find her twin and I didn't really go looking for mine, but I would've loved to meet the person two people mistook for me.