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
Food
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
How to Live in a Summer Moment
Summer is color at long last after months of a monochromatic landscape, not only the verdant carpet that defines our namesake Green Mountains in Vermont, but in what it yields: marbled veins and rivulets in crimson radicchio, the bitter leaf that will cavort a while later with exotic mesclun and mustard greens waiting patiently in … Continue reading How to Live in a Summer Moment
Photo Essay: Saturday in Three Parts
We really did miss out on spring, dang it. Winter held fast, and then fought tooth and nail before it finally relented sometime a couple of weeks ago. There were fair weather days here and there; they were but an illusion, some atmospheric sleight of hand at work, wicked trickery you might call it. And … Continue reading Photo Essay: Saturday in Three Parts
I Can’t Twirl Pasta (and other truths): Weekend Vignettes
Whoever coined the ridiculous phrase, You can do whatever you want to do, was dead wrong: I can never be a rocket scientist (not that I wanted to). I do want to twirl pasta skillfully against a spoon and I can't do that, either. Still makes for pretty pictures and good eatin' no matter how it … Continue reading I Can’t Twirl Pasta (and other truths): Weekend Vignettes
Stretching Dollars, Counting Blessings
Winter was kind enough last week to gift us its annual January thaw, which means the schmutz on the ground—an unpleasant casserole of crusty, gritty snow with a menacing bottom layer of ice—retreated obediently into atmosphere and earth. We have frost heaves already, a phenomenon more typical in early spring. Extreme cold temperatures arrived in … Continue reading Stretching Dollars, Counting Blessings
Wilmington in Black and White
We pulled the Subaru into our Vermont driveway late yesterday afternoon with another 2,200 miles on it, a couple of road-weary travelers we, still a little sugar-frosted from the beach and lightly crisped around the edges. I made it all the way to the Pennsylvania state line on Saturday before I fought back tears thinking … Continue reading Wilmington in Black and White
Farm Stand and General Store: Evolved New England Institutions
The concept of the general store revealed itself to me the instant I had boots on the ground in my new home state of Vermont. Most small farming communities here have one (and so that would be most of Vermont, which is largely made of small farming communities). But their store offerings vary widely, to say … Continue reading Farm Stand and General Store: Evolved New England Institutions
Self-Stewardship: Healthful Habits, Happy Body
Updates: I am pretty dang pleased to report my foot issues have not yet derailed this latest big effort to resurrect my beloved running habit. I told somebody yesterday I've learned to view every glorious, temperate day in Vermont as a gift; last week there were several of them, and the temperature once even climbed into the … Continue reading Self-Stewardship: Healthful Habits, Happy Body
New England Track & Field Championships: When Life Hands You Lemons
It's track and field season here in New England; maybe in other parts of the world, too, not sure—this is well outside my life experience bubble. 'Tis also the season when Handsome Chef Boyfriend morphs from pastry chef by day to pole vaulting coach by afternoon and the occasional weekend, true story: he coaches invincible … Continue reading New England Track & Field Championships: When Life Hands You Lemons
Sycamore Stories 