Staff Blog
Faith in Vermont: Disagreeing With Maggie Gyllenhaal
One night at the end of December, I attended a film screening and discussion at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater. This is not how I typically spend my evenings, and I would have missed the event completely were it not for a friend who...
Faith in Vermont: The Search for a Theme Song
Before I had children, back when I was a twenty-something elementary school teacher in New York City and had just started dating my future husband, I used to watch the quirky television sitcom Ally McBeal. Though most of that show has sunk...
Faith in Vermont: "It's January"
My 11-year-old daughter, usually my most centered child, was seething. Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides, her breathing sped up, and she was gnashing her teeth – actually gnashing her teeth. (I’d never really...
Faith in Vermont: American Girls
On the second day of 2019, because everyone else had returned to school but our homeschooling family was taking a full second week of vacation, because our eldest daughter complained that “we never go anywhere,” and because we...
Faith in Vermont: Mudroom Mercy
When we first looked at the house that is now our home, the realtor told us that all other prospective buyers had walked away after they saw it: The house’s layout was just too strange for anybody to figure out how to make it work....
Poem: Lying in State
Isn’t it his dog
we’re drawn to,
his yellow lab retriever?
Lying in the Rotunda.
Close to his flag-draped,
military coffin.
Trained to stay, until
she’s called to be
of service. Somehow...
Faith in Vermont: Food, Freedom, Forgiveness: A Thanksgiving Meditation
Well, here we are on the other side of Thanksgiving. A rather counter-cultural holiday, isn’t it? Or at least counter to what American culture has been becoming.
To begin with, Thanksgiving seems to have resisted much of the...
Faith in Vermont: Daylight Savings
“Could somebody please explain Daylight Savings Time to me?!?” my nine-year-old daughter wailed last week. “I mean, I just figured out how Leap Year works!”
We were in our minivan, driving a...
Faith in Vermont: Our Newest Addition
According to our family’s well-loved edition of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Hermes, the “merriest of the Olympians, was the god of shepherds, travelers, merchants, thieves, and all others who lived by their...
Faith in Vermont: Small, Sharp Things
Not that there’s ever a good time, but the “low tire pressure” light came on in our minivan at a particularly inconvenient time.
It was a chilly, overcast Saturday morning in early October, the kind of morning that...