Maria and I traveled back in time Tuesday morning, we had breakfast in a funky old restaurant on Main Street in the working-class Vermont town of Fair Haven.

Much of Vermont seems to have willfully escaped the American habit of bulldozing everything that was and making everything bigger, uglier and more impersonal.

The very best places to eat – Jean’s, The Wooden Soldier – seem caught in time, they have stood still.

In the Wooden Soldier, built sometime in the 1940s, everything is as it was, from the tin ceiling to the round wooden tables, to the dark booths with individual mirrors, to the quite spectacular row of stool seats.

The owner, a middle-aged woman with white hair, knew every single person who came in but us, they all seemed to be picking up conversations that started years ago and never really stop.

There was a lot of talk about cars.

We did not belong, of course, and while everybody treated us well, we were clearly outsiders, we didn’t get any of the friendly and warm and welcoming chatter and questions that everybody else got.

Jean’s seems to welcome strangers, the Wood Soldier treated us courtesy, but there was certainly a sort of fence around us,  if you looked for it. It did not bother me, but I felt it.

Up where I live, if you come there late in life, as I did, and lived for many years in the “other world,” you will always be a bit of a refugee. I know that and accept it. I don’t aspire to be local, it just isn’t who I am.

When you move to the country at age 58, you become a citizen of nowhere, really. You can’t go back, and you will never be fully accepted where you are.

I feel completely at home where I live, but the truth is, I have no home, not really.

At Jean’s, I always am made to feel like family, that is unusual. At the Wooden Soldier, I felt like a visitor passing through.  Nobody really needs to get to know me.

And there is some truth to that. I am just passing through. I’ve lived elsewhere much longer than I’ve lived here. This was a feeling I knew well when I was a reporter. Nobody likes a reporter or feels easy with one around.

I loved the Wooden Soldier, it has so much character and feeling. I loved the humming fan.

The food was good and there was a lot of it.  I couldn’t see one thing that suggested any kind of renovation or change in half a century, including the bathrooms.

I’d love to come back with my big camera one morning and take some portraits.

Walking inside, I felt as if I had entered another world. I had.

I want to go back.