Last Looks

Posted July 26, 2024

Filed under Life

Oh Vermont, ours has been a forty plus year love affair which I still cling to even while I prepare to move west. Happy lake time runs from May into October and brings a constant treat. Diving in takes precedence on most afternoons, yet each time I consider myself lucky. There are more than 800 lakes and ponds in Vermont, one more spectacular than the other: I have done my best to swim in lots of them, although I have found favorites they are all fabulous. Of course there is more to my love than one season’s occupation. There is the richness of green hills against the brilliant blue sky, the sweet smell of yellow flowers that run Spring through Fall, as well as the stark black and white beauty of Winter. All an integral part of me now.

As the movers lift the last of our boxes into their truck, I am certain it will all come with me.

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hope in my hood

Posted April 16, 2020

Filed under Life

For several years we have lived on this same street, the one I’ve driven mostly at the speed limit. Except for the occasional weekend run up and back down the adjacent dirt road, during this shelter in place time, I’ve been walking this street and all about in my neighborhood, a lot. My new favorite jaunt is a 3.5 mile loop that for a section of that distance I pass by open water. It’s a shallow, in spots reedy and swampy pond, but right now, the sight of the wind rippling across it is heaven. In March, when we first began the stay at home order, the pond was broadly covered by ice but under a cloudy or blue sky this expanse was everything wonderful to see even while frozen and stagnant and filled me with enough joy to navigate another challenging day.

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Retracing your Steps

Posted July 11, 2019

Filed under Life

They say there is no going back, not in time or otherwise, yet we all feel that pull to see it as we once did, whatever that it might be. Perhaps the core of this is best expressed in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in Act III, during that iconic graveyard scene when the dead speak.

EMILY: But, Mother Gibbs, one can go back; one can go back there again . . . into living. I feel it. I know it. Why just then for a moment I was thinking about . . . about the farm . . . and for a minute I was there, and my baby was on my lap as plain as day.

MRS. GIBBS: Yes, of course you can.

EMILY: I can go back there and live all those days over again . . . why not?

MRS. GIBBS: All I can say is, Emily, don’t.

Warnings aside, we did just venture back to an ancestral place, one that will always have a place in my heart, and although I did discover how powerful the draw to return to one’s past can be, the present is always available, and exactly that, a gift.