Born in Ca. but spent most of my life in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.
Yes, I love them both...their mountains, their oceans,and the off-the-beaten path roads that hypotnotize you when you drive them.

In college, I had the most remarkable English professor. She was bright, & funny & sitting in her class was like a shot of adrenaline. She changed my life.
In her class, we didn’t just read Wordsworth or Eliot. We read Augustine & Descartes & Adler. We read botanists'diaries, essays on Time/Space, & newspaper articles from the 1900s in Colorado. And not in any particular order. She wanted us to understand that the whole of human history is woven together. One thing always begets another. And that nothing we do is without consequence.

She was brave. She was surrounded by colleagues who disdained her. But she never apologized for her principles. She was devoted to the Individual. She loathed “collectivism” & saw it as the single greatest threat to what she called, “the Life of the Mind”. She was Conservative in the finest sense of the word.

And reading the posts in Free Republic is almost like being in one of her classes again.