that day Scout and I met up with a Great Blue Heron on the Walloomsac in downtown Bennington A tragic story lies herein. The Green Mountain State is doing what it does in January, and nobody should be surprised. Still. For this Southern transplant, at this particular mile marker in the journey, bone and sinew … Continue reading Sitting with My Sadness
Friends
Beware of Goat (And So Much More)
our sign is up Would that Van-Goat-the-Statuary were all any of us needed to beware of at this moment. One of my bffs down South once told me a story that will stay with me forever. It happened way back in the day when she was still in college in her twenties, and working part-time … Continue reading Beware of Goat (And So Much More)
Thanksgiving Journal: Family Ties
Today when my irreverent twenty-something video messaged me, I explained I was making cookie press cookies. He watched me mix in the flour and work the batter until the dough was the right consistency to extrude through the press. I said the last time I used this little device he was still in elementary school, … Continue reading Thanksgiving Journal: Family Ties
Dog Story: It Must Be the Biscuits
Whole wheat that gives shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. Heavens, they're tasty, and expeditious!—A Prairie Home Companion The shy Scout-the-Labish is coming into his own. Although lately I’ve been calling our tawny little guy of unknown parentage a Goldapeake Retriever, hijacking the clever adverts an Australian … Continue reading Dog Story: It Must Be the Biscuits
Music Story: Verdi + Friends
Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem—or simply Requiem, as it’s often called—is big work that goes down like a gulp of a chewy Cabernet, a soul-satisfying swill of life that gets bigger and better with every reprised chorus of Dies Irae—the day of wrath. It was among the last of his works, near the end of … Continue reading Music Story: Verdi + Friends
Vermontish Doppelgängers and Other Christmas Week Reflections
This one thing still happens to me every week, if not every day: I see somebody and I think I know who it is for an instant, and then remember there is no way I could possibly know them. I am new here still, and mainly disconnected, still. Back ‘home’ in Knoxville I could scarcely … Continue reading Vermontish Doppelgängers and Other Christmas Week Reflections
New Real Friends: A (Hopeful) Lamentation
Our parents serve as eternal reminders of every ‘cute’ thing we said and did in childhood, however stridently we might wish to forget: it’s a parenting privilege. I find myself doing it to my own twenty-something these days, even across the miles that separate us. I need my bref-kass, I mutter in the early morning … Continue reading New Real Friends: A (Hopeful) Lamentation
Idling in Vermont
Some forty years after its publication Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia is still considered a pivotal and authoritative piece of travel writing about this 400,000-square-mile South American region. Ferdinand Magellan called the tall aboriginals he encountered there Patagones after a mythic character, it is rumored, hence its name. Straddling two countries and claiming most of a … Continue reading Idling in Vermont
You Can’t Sit With Us: Reflections on a “Mean Girls” National Policy
Find someone who looks like they need a friend, and be that person's friend: it was my mama's mandate to me on the first day of third grade, a tall order for an eight-year-old kid at a new school, but the outcome for me that year was a tight friendship with a sweet, third-generation Scot. It … Continue reading You Can’t Sit With Us: Reflections on a “Mean Girls” National Policy
It’s *good* to covet things.
One of the best presents ever, those pecans. My dear friend Bett sent them to us last Christmas; she said she gathered them from the bumper crop on the ground under two pecan trees near where her mama lives on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. I saved the tags and stuck them to the walls in my … Continue reading It’s *good* to covet things.
Sycamore Stories 