Fall is here
I know it’s truly fall when an email pops up in my mailbox with the heading: “Lamb with a Plan.” It’s John O’Brien, the Tunbridge sheep farmer inquiring if we wish to buy lamb again this year.
I know it’s truly fall when an email pops up in my mailbox with the heading: “Lamb with a Plan.” It’s John O’Brien, the Tunbridge sheep farmer inquiring if we wish to buy lamb again this year.
Here is a beautiful word I learned this past summer: deliquescence. It means having a tendency to melt or become liquid, to dissolve. I love it, the way it sounds, the idea, the imagery that comes with such a word. That something could kind of dissolve slowly, disappear … deliquesce.
Thank God for books. Books are many things…and one thing they are is an escape from the world. Not that I don’t love the world, because I do, but sometimes it all just gets to be too much. Like these past weeks.
It’s a quiet time of year now, as we begin that slow and ominous trek to shorter and colder days. Thank goodness for the brilliance along the way: the last gasp hues of the maple leaves, the deep red of the apples and, in my case, the bright pop of the yellow table out on the deck in a landscape otherwise gray and white and brown and rainy.
It was Tuesday afternoon, when the kids get out of school early — dismissal is at 2 p.m. instead of 3. My daughter, Coco, had made a plan with some of her 8th grade friends to walk across the street after school to Philo Ridge Farm. I loved this idea, that the kids have a place they could walk to from their school. I loved their planning and I loved, even more, the execution, which I saw because I drove past the school at just the moment when they were being chaperoned from CCS to Philo Ridge by none other than their principal, Jen Roth.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who gave me a vote in the recent primary election. I do not take your support for granted, and I appreciate the confidence you place in me to do a good job representing you in Montpelier.
My Grandfather Hooker loomed like a giant at 6 feet 6 inches tall with size 15 black shoes that laced to the ankles. Even his walrus mustache and beard seemed unusual, accompanied by his commanding manner. He was born in Brenchley, Kent, England, in 1864 and hoped to become a professional magician. A frayed poster announced his performance at age 16 in a local establishment called the Lime Tree Coffee House.
This has been a summer, as have the past few, when driving up to Eden we often feel like we’re part of a motorcycle rally on Rte. 100. Headed north and south alike, the flocks of cyclists on the road take me back to my youth when my hometown in southern Minnesota was on the main line to Sturgis, South Dakota, rallying point of cyclists since 1938.
A few years ago, I went on a trip with extended family and a couple of intrepid friends to the Galapagos. The trip involved two nights in Quito, Equador, and a week of travel by boat to the various islands, where khaki-clad naturalists walked us around carefully circumscribed paths, pointing out interesting phenomena: giant tortoises, blue-footed boobies, sharks, sea turtles, flamingoes and all kinds of other fauna and flora and so on.
The Vermont Land Trust has a long history of conserving Vermont’s most productive working lands. As VLT’s president, I’m proud of that track record, but I’m also concerned about our farm and forest economy. These lands and the industries that rely on them are facing real challenges today, with bigger challenges on the horizon.
Strange memories drive your mind, don’t they? My wife, Beth, has been going through items from my parents’ house in order to figure out what she might want to sell in her antique booth in Burlington. Today’s items are pictures that covered the walls of many rooms there. A good number of them are pictures of ducks and other game. They are usually groups of fowl setting their wings to land or flying over a blind, settling in a marsh, reminding me once again that my dad’s major sideline was hunting and our neighbor was a duck-stamp artist. When the duck, goose and pheasant seasons ended, Dad turned to trap and skeet. Guns ended up being year-round features in our house.
I just returned from a week in London where I visited my daughter, who had a summer internship there. We got around quite a bit in seven days: saw two plays, went to the Tate, the National Gallery, took a boat trip up the Thames and, a few days later, a train out to Brighton Beach, which doesn’t have sand but, rather, small round stones.
I know I have mentioned this in several different ways since I arrived back here a few months ago, but I wanted to make some things clear, believing that there are readers who harbor misconceptions about the nature of the operations of The News. As has been made abundantly clear by our recent celebratory “ads,” the paper was founded 60 years ago in the basement of the Congregational Church by several enterprising teenagers and the indefatigable Nancy Wood. This newspaper is a nonprofit enterprise, relying on advertising dollars and fundraising efforts to keep the presses rolling. Almost all of the contributors—writers and photographers—do so without compensation, and the staff members receive salaries that would probably make you laugh.
It has been 45 years since the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade ruled 7-2, in a decision written by Justice Harry Blackmun, that the Constitution protected a woman’s decision to have an abortion. Abortion rights have remained a newsworthy issue ever since and have come to the fore once again with the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and the conservative leanings of President Trump.
Julia Child wrote her last cookbook at 87 years old. Frank Wright worked until he was 91. Robert Marchand set a new world record for his age group in bicycling nearly 17 miles in one hour when he was 102 years old. I am unsure if the above leaves me encouraged or discouraged.
Now that the graduations are behind us, school is out and most of us are well into our summer activities and ways of life, it becomes clearer just how diverse the opportunities of this season are.
Times have changed. Really changed. In 1964 I embarked on an adventure that would today result in a trip to the hospital if not the morgue. This is a true tale of my escape from despair into a meandering saga that played out beyond my wildest dreams.
It’s funny how we always think that summer is going to be a nice, slow time of year and then the season is upon us and everyone is running in ten directions and even though the days are really long it feels like there’s never enough time to do everything. Through the long, cold winter we yearn for the reprieve of summer days and then it arrives and we’re running ourselves ragged doing so much.
Have any of you readers ever been to Ankh-Morpork? Sounds like a craving for food, doesn’t it? But, no, it’s the capital of Disc World. Yes, and where is that you ask? Well, of course, it’s a flat world resting on the backs of four elephants standing on top of a gigantic turtle moving slowly through space.
I spent all last week at Fordham University where I am finishing up a degree in pastoral care. I took a class in pastoral counseling skills, and though most of the classes for this degree have been online, this one had an on-campus requirement. I lived in a dorm for the week, which was both peaceful and horrible, monastic-like and, well, suffice it to say I don’t miss that particular aspect of college life at all.