My mother loves to get out during the week, so I try to make use of time if I am not teaching in the morning to go and pick her up and take her on an adventure. I pull up underneath the roof outside her building’s front doorway and wait for her to come out….
Category: Vermont
Homage To Things Frozen
Stepping out the front door and off the steps I balance two heavy metal buckets of water. I feel a deep pull from inside my shoulders, familiar, warm. I take a moment as I walk, to push my breath out from inside the warmth of my body into the frigid air. I watch as it…
Melissa Featured in Rent.com Blog
With their home in the heart of the charming fictional town of Stars Hollow, CT, the Gilmore Girls – Lorelai and Rory – have captivated audiences young and old with their quick wit, strong bond, and a lifestyle brimming with cozy charm. From their iconic coffee runs to their love for literature and all things…
What Frequency
I’m spending a lot of time sending out baby photos. Baby tomato photos documenting the growth from seedling to the true-leaves phase. I’m as proud as any new parent. Our kitchen has an eerie grow-light-glow that colors everyone’s face pale green. We began with about fifty seedlings. This afternoon I stood at the kitchen counter,…
Dirt Roads
There is a kind of buzzing under my skin in late February and March: it’s not bees, it’s a persistent, recurring agitation. It is mud. Late February, regardless of cloud cover, the sun is warmer. Driving the dirt road to our house I notice a new shiny slickness. The road becomes consistently wet, resembling the…
That Sticky Time Of Year
When we get a winter thaw that lasts longer than a few days, there is a concern that apple trees will bud out, birds and bugs might make an early arrival, bears could wake and lumber down to forage from bird feeders. It can also cause sap to run early. This happened in February; the…
Town Meeting Day
In Vermont, schools have their winter break at the end of February. The bonus has always been that Tuesday, March 4 is Town Meeting Day so kids have no school on Monday and Tuesday of the week following vacation. Every town in the state used to have Town Meeting: now it is optional, the town…
The Light Returns
Last weekend I had a rehearsal for a string quartet performance that I’m part of and, as we were finishing and I was folding up music stands, I realized that although it was 5:00, it was still pretty light outside. In Vermont, most of our winter is spent in relative hibernation. Some of this is…
Doorway To Magic
The wind began to blow last night. If it is hard enough that you can hear it pushing against the outside walls, maybe it is trying to get closer to the wood stove. I leaned my head back against the couch and watched the trees swaying in the blue shadow of moonlight. The wind was…
Still
The weather was not traditionally “Christmas-y” two weeks before the holiday. We had unseasonably warm temperatures leaving only traces of earlier snow spilling into darkened crevices in the woods. Any precipitation fell in drops rather than flakes. We braced ourselves for a green (brown) Christmas. We planned on taking the week of Christmas off, knowing…
Woolen Mill
We grabbed the three dark bags bulging full with wool. Some that hadn’t found its way into our last shipment to be made into blankets and some from a recent shearing. We’d decided to use this smaller batch to make some specialty yarn from a small Vermont mill that we had heard good things about….
Out Of The Nest
Spending a lot of time going up and down the hill to the garden. The tomato wagon has plants bursting with tomatoes leaning precariously off its wooden edges. We have cherries, heirlooms, Old Germans, Early Boys and a couple of new varieties. Tender new kale leaves push forward as soon as I snip larger leaves…
Being There
I finished feeding sheep and chickens this morning, walked up the hill to begin baby-chick chores and stopped. In the busyness of the day there was an odd silence. I stood facing the woods, listening intently, I realized that the Hermit Thrush was gone. Theirs is a sound that I’ve never become accustomed to: I…