One of my cello students wasn’t able to make their lesson today giving me an unexpected hour. Snow has just started falling outside so I am taking the seat next to the wood stove to write. All three dogs are on their sides on the wood floor, happy, as I am, to be near the…
Category: Family
Welcome Home
We are about to get new neighbors. Our house sits at the end of a dead end road. The land and woods surrounding us is ours. In giving directions to customers coming to the shop in January, we are able to tell them if they run into the snowbank- they’ve gone too far. Here, the…
Pete’s Gone
January in Vermont is a challenging month; the holidays are over. Gone are the colorful lights, businesses covered in red bows and greenery, and egg nog. What comes now are the long days of winter. We are just past a few days of lovely snow chased by a day of solid rain. The oil and…
New Year In The Blue House
There ought to be a mandate for fireworks as the year changes. Not so much because it is special, more so as to shake us. The New Year falls close to the solstice. It does, as it should, create a stirring in our hibernation. Tucked deep in thought rather than clipping fields, I find myself…
Gifts
The trees are strung, the lights are lit. We have wreaths on each outside door and a jumble of sleigh bells swinging from the door handle whenever someone enters the house. December. Every year we host a neighborhood gathering. In Covid, we had everyone outside: we rented a large space heater to warm the garage,…
Gratitude
Yesterday we spent the day transforming the house from fall to winter celebrations. We cut the two Christmas trees that we had tagged in October: a cold, wet drizzle falling, reminding us that it was still November. The dogs stuck their heads out the window as we drove through town, making us look a bit…
Change
It is November in Vermont. The in-between, stick season. Autumn: time for long sleeves, hats (the warm, not cute kind) and mittens. However, this past week was in the seventies. I stubbornly continued to dress for pre-winter and, although I did grin and bear it, I admit I perspired. We can’t really call this a…
All Hallows Eve
Muir is sitting next to the front steps. Guided by intuition, he knows I have the ATV key in my front pocket and chores to do I walk past him and he trots along behind me to the lower hay storage. He lies down and looks up as I swing myself onto the seat, start…
Parenting Older Children
The rain and wind started today, whipping the leaves into autumn confetti. The temperature outside hovered around fifty degrees, not terribly cold by VT standards in October but cold enough to warrant throwing a few sticks into the woodstove to take the chill off. I looked out the kitchen window and could see the sheep…
Moving: The Spookiest Word
Moving. Even typing the word upsets my stomach. We are currently looking at the back side of moving my mother from the home that she and my father were in for twenty years before he died, into an apartment I’m still having moving nightmares. There are only a few things I hate more than moving,…
The Importance Of Impermanence
Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves. We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves. -Humbert Wolfe, (1885-1940) It is the opening weekend of October and we are ablaze. If you don’t see it now- you don’t see it. Paul and I try to save Sunday for projects…
Finality
Recently I was laying in bed on a warm evening and was struck by the symphony lulling me to sleep. The crickets, all shapes and sizes, were rubbing their wings together singing. Some on the beat, some off, periodically a high pitched sawing song would join in creating harmony. During the earlier hours the Thrush…
Paper Hanger
There is a truth that is somewhere between death and taxes: if you have one room in your house painted, or perhaps wallpapered, soon you will find another room that would look a smidge better if it too, were painted or papered. Paul and I were at a coffee house in Middlebury this winter and…
Magnificent, Mischievous, Magical, Maniacal Muir
I headed down to the garden this afternoon, vegetable basket in hand. It has been a month since thegarlic scapes were cut and the leaves are now beginning to brown. Time to harvest. I stuff my feet intomy brilliant yellow Crocs and begin walking down Magic Road. Following close behind are all threeBorder Collies; Sam,…