Staff Blog
Faith in Vermont: Curses!
“Mommy broke the compost bin and said a bad word!”
On the first Friday of March, my daughters broadcast this announcement to every person we saw: friends, family, neighbors, check-out clerks. It was BIG NEWS in our household,...
Faith in Vermont: Riding in the Death Star
“I bought us a truck,” my husband announced one night as he walked into the house after a day at the office.
My daughters reacted to the news as if we’d just announced a candy-only dinner, a week off of school, and a trip to...
Faith in Vermont: Oh, My Dog!
Of all the human and non-human species that make up our family, I’ve written the least about our dog, Gracie. My daughters always do nutty things, the ducks and chickens teach us about life and death, and my husband is the “straight...
Faith in Vermont: Safety
It was this year’s peculiar cocktail of sub-zero temperatures, accumulating snow, thaws with mixed precipitation followed by a return to freezing temperatures – combined with the heavy clay soil and topography of our property...
Faith in Vermont: Typewriters, and the Future of Vermont
Last Sunday afternoon, a friend invited me to accompany her to a screening of Doug Nichol’s new documentary film, “California Typewriter,” at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater.
Sunday afternoons are usually times I set...
Poem: At the Christmas Tree Farm
At the Christmas Tree Farm
Whenever I ask you
to turn down your outside speaker,
you point to your ears,
your trees needing to be sold.
Not that I’m against Joy
to the World.
Yet some afternoons,
trying to...
Faith in Vermont: This Little Light
One week ago, my daughters made beeswax candles for the first time. Before you get impressed, this was not the sort of candle making that involves dipping wicks into a vat of hot wax; our sort of candle making involved ordering sheets of...
Faith in Vermont: Missing Santa Claus
Our family missed Santa Claus this year.
Ever since we moved to Vermont seven years ago, our family has attended the “Very Merry Middlebury” festivities in downtown Middlebury on the first Saturday of December. This annual...
Faith in Vermont: For the Boy Next Door
When we moved into our current house, we moved next door to a boy. He’s an only child, and we share part of our long driveway with him and his mother.
The boy next door, whom I’ll call Theo, was nine years old at the time –...
Faith in Vermont: Curiouser and Curiouser
“The flags are lowered again! What happened this time, Mama?”
I was driving three of my daughters along Route 7, down to Brandon for a rehearsal of their homeschool production of Alice in Wonderland.
The last time I’d...