You may be by yourself, but you’re not alone. I couldn’t have foreseen sitting outside in our lovely outdoor space on the first warm, sunny spring day in Vermont while our world suffers through a pandemic, but here we are. Yesterday The Chef pulled all the outside furniture out of winter storage, brushed off the … Continue reading A Reflection: Finding Grace in Solitude
Handsome Chef Boyfriend
October in Vermont: Season of ‘Lasts’
It’s unfair to name October a season, which more properly belongs to fall. But it does mark a big transition in these parts, a time beyond which the air feels more authentically like winter to a person with Southern roots. Not once in the five Vermont winters I’ve seen have we missed a respectable snowfall—a … Continue reading October in Vermont: Season of ‘Lasts’
Scout’s Big Epiphany
Whatever life experiences shaped Scout-the-Lab before he came to us last December, there is this one truth about him, and about all dogs says the vet: they forget nothing. Scout’s skittishness is authentic, part and parcel of who he is. I may have envisioned a goofy, tail-wagging demeanor in my early quest for this dog, … Continue reading Scout’s Big Epiphany
Dogged Adventures: Asheville Is Noisy
The metal carabiner-like clip that fastens to the harness part of Scout-the-Lab’s seatbelt is maddening, like that childhood game Barrel Full of Monkeys: just when you think you’re about to get it clipped—or unclipped as the case may be—an irksome little hook (think crochet needle) gets hung up and refuses to slip through the metal … Continue reading Dogged Adventures: Asheville Is Noisy
Dogged Adventures: No Complaints About Rainy Days
When it’s cold-ish, rainy, and a bit blustery on vacation, you spend a fair amount of time in your cheap hotel room doing mainly nothing. Or riding shotgun around town with your twenty-something while he shows you new stuff and changed stuff and plain missing stuff. Five years is long enough for the landscape to … Continue reading Dogged Adventures: No Complaints About Rainy Days
Dogged Adventures: Where the South Begins
Just a few yards past mile marker 152 and nine tenths on Virginia’s southbound Interstate 81 stands a tall clump of vegetation completely engulfed in kudzu—fully involved, the fire department would say—like some unfortunate character from Middle Earth awaiting release from a centuries-long curse, or maybe more like the creatures the White Witch turned to … Continue reading Dogged Adventures: Where the South Begins
Dogged Adventures: Preparing a Shy Dog (And His Humans) for Travel
When I moved to Vermont five years ago I had Clarence-the-Canine in tow, my beloved German Shepherd Dog who saw me through the worst chapter in my life, and then left the planet when he knew I’d be okay. My then-teenager came with us to help during the first week of this huge midlife reboot, … Continue reading Dogged Adventures: Preparing a Shy Dog (And His Humans) for Travel
Family Vacations: The Summers of My Discontent
Nothing sends me into a tailspin faster than a technological mishap: this would include power outages and car problems, to say nothing of broken laptops. I’ve been in a tailspin since the first week in August, the week my shiny new laptop failed catastrophically on a Saturday morning, an incident that prompted a series of … Continue reading Family Vacations: The Summers of My Discontent
Deer Flies and Summer Storms: First Day in July
Cool air washed clean by the rain that came before it makes the deer flies retreat: that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. There was only steam yesterday, July 1st of 2017. Frontal boundaries on the afternoon horizon stood in stark contrast against menacing, billowy black storm clouds floating above them and clearer skies … Continue reading Deer Flies and Summer Storms: First Day in July
Sunday Photo Essay: Remnants of the Adelphi
Broadway is the main drag in downtown Saratoga Springs, New York, a smallish upstate city with a distinctly urban feel and an appealing quirkiness that defines so many downtown districts coming into their own after a period of modern-day decline. A city with so much going for it—named for the mineral water that flows beneath … Continue reading Sunday Photo Essay: Remnants of the Adelphi
Sycamore Stories 