Sitting in the music room teaching I looked out the window and noticed an eerie long garland of brittle brown leaves swinging back and forth in the breeze. They were held together by an invisible thread making it Halloween worthy. Each day I make a point of noticing them and each day the garland grows….
Author: Melissa Perley
The Day
The week has been magical; dry and sunny and the foliage seems to have arrived with the tour buses. Driving to and from home we pass underneath an archway of color. Windows down we hear our tires crunch through fallen leaves and watch them blow out from behind our car, like confetti following a parade….
Walking Into The Past
It has been one of those weeks; every line on every day in the calendar book full. This weekend the weather was sunny and dry and we decided to skip digging potatoes and hike heading to one of our favorite fall foliage areas in the Champlain Valley. Leaf litter crunches as a light breeze pulls…
Preparing
I close the gate to the pasture after letting the sheep in and push hard on the metal gate to the garden. Long tendrils curl away from the pumpkins, small yellow bulbs swell but don’t really resemble a Jack O’lantern yet. Kale plants, eternally hardy, faithfully push new leaves out for me to harvest. The…
Fair Time
The beginning of the third week in September has a distinctly different feel to it. Something wonderful this way comes. It is the Tunbridge fair. Paul and I talk about who will check the fair schedule, feed the dogs, and bring sheep up so that we are ready to leave as quickly as possible. It…
Cidre
The leaves are beginning to drop. Some color is showing itself on the mountainside[s] but the majority of maple leaves are rusty, without their normal brilliance. Because we are Vermonters, we have to explain everything in terms of weather; this year, the lack of brilliance thus far is being put down to the unprecedented height…
Circle Of Fire
The red cider press is bolted to the deck and ready to go. Leaves spin down, our road already covered. Our apple trees are loaded with hanging fruit which are also beginning to drop. It is cider season. Tomorrow we will spend the morning of the holiday as we do most years, at the Labor…
Making Change
As we enter the Dog days we are spending a lot of time harvesting. I find that when I am kneeling at the earth’s alter, my hands busy pulling carrots that will be sauteed in a cast iron skillet until they release sweetness from under their charred exteriors, my brain has time to free-wheel. I…
Our Measure Of Progress
As we round the corner into August, I begin to feel a push to squeeze all of the things we dream about in February into this month. When you live in Vermont you recognize that summer time is limited. In June we are still finishing recitals, auditions and lessons. That week Paul and I ran…
Summer’s Not Over Yet
When I am looking out the window in early January, and the snowplow has just gone by creating a white wall at the end of our driveway making it impassible without a snowblower and some shoveling, and the only way to get water to livestock is in metal buckets filled in our bathtub, winter wins…
The Art Of Taking and Giving
This morning I pulled a large steel bowl from under the counter and headed down to our “mobile” garden. Living in the woods means that our main vegetable garden is done with sun by mid afternoon. This works for most of our growing but not for tomatoes or basil so we repurposed one of our…