"For more than a hundred years, anyone willing to leave this countryside has been rewarded for leaving it by more money, leisure, and creature comforts. A few may have stayed from fecklessness or lack of gumption; more have stayed from family feeling or homesickness; but most stay from love. I live among a population, extraordinary in our culture, that lives where it lives because it loves its place. We are self-selected place-lovers. There's no reason to live here except for love."

From Seasons at Eagle Pond, by Donald Hall, Wilmot, N.H.-based poet and essayist.