Singing An Old Song

After my most recent column appeared, I ended up taking an unintentional sabbatical from writing. Teaching full-time while ushering my family through the winter holidays occupied most of my energy. Then, on New Year’s Eve, various members of our family began falling ill with what would become a cycle of every virus on the market. (I’m still not sure we’re completely in the clear, but we’re running out of germ options).

During this time, a Presidential election occurred. Now that I have enough bandwidth to lift my head and survey the terrain, I find that the landscape is depressingly familiar. Some people are triumphant, some are grieving, and nearly everyone is angry at someone else. Despite knowing better, mature adults can’t seem to resist posting polarizing items on social media; despite knowing better, other mature adults can’t seem to resist responding, and our divisions deepen and harden. It’s a difficult time for those who prioritize kind discourse and caring for others, who flinch at policies and rhetoric that seem designed to shock and divide further; these people stare at each other with desperate eyes and whisper, “What can we do? How can we help?”

We have been here before. Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

Of course, it’s not just the second verse: It’s an old, old song. I was reminded of this recently, when I took my children to New York City for February vacation to see the Broadway musical Hadestown, written by our Addison County neighbor, the brilliant Anais Mitchell.

Hadestown is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Mitchell portrays Orpheus’s attempt to rescue his beloved Eurydice from Hades’s underworld as a struggle of art, beauty, and love against the forces of death, industrialization, and power. Mitchell re-tells the myth faithfully rather than concocting a Disney-fied happy ending, which is to say: death, industrialization, and power win in the end.

Or do they?

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Favorite Books of 2024

Happy New Year, Friends!

I chose the painting above to illustrate this post because it perfectly captures the sort of reading year 2024 was for me; in a word, distracted. While I read roughly as many books as usual (about 30, give or take), most of those were concentrated in the early months of the year. In August, I went back to work teaching full time at a school an hour’s drive away, and my reading dropped off precipitously. Nevertheless, I wanted to share some of my favorites here.

Favorite Fiction

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin

This is a novel so sweeping that I can’t begin to summarize it. It’s the story of a remarkable life, in the spirit of, say David Copperfield, Kristin Lavransdatter, or Les Miserables, but it’s particular in its medieval Russian setting. Love, grace, and atonement are all themes. I definitely want to read more by Vodolazkin.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

I inhaled this book at a lake in New Hampshire at the end of the summer, which was just about the perfect time and place to read it. A much easier read than Laurus, but no less stirring in its themes of motherhood, regret, and the stories we tell our children.

Favorite Nonfiction

The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl

A friend from Nashville sent me this book from Ann Patchett’s Parnassus Books, so I was bound to love it from the start! I’d recommend reading Renkl’s reflections on the life she observes in her backyard throughout the seasons slowly; I read one chapter a week for the entire year so that I was actually living each season Renkl describes in such loving and beautiful detail.

The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

This book is an unflinching look at what we already know but would prefer to ignore: That the advent of smartphones and social media is rewiring our children’s minds and leading to increased anxiety and isolation. It’s such an important read for any parent or educator, but it’s also hopeful and practical.

Favorite Religious/Spiritual Books

Reasons to Believe by Scott Hahn

One of the most important (and unexpected!) things that happened in our family this year was that we joined the Catholic Church. That’s a long and complicated story that deserves its own post at some point. But it involved a LOT of reading, and this clear and cogent book by Scott Hahn played a major role in my own journey. (Thank you, Chelsey!)

The Reed of God by Caryll Houselander

The sleeper hit of my year! The Reed of God showed up in the blog of an Anglican author I follow, as a recommended Advent read. I thought I’d read all the Advent books there were, so I was intrigued. It turned out to be classic reflection on the attributes of Mary, and what they have to tell us about our relation to God. Now I hope to read it annually at Advent.

Favorite Children’s/Young Adult Books

As a parent of five and now as a 4th grade language/literature teacher, most of the books I read fall into this category — and they’re usually my favorites. This year was no exception.

Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

This was a favorite for me and for the two teenagers in our house who also read it this year. Nayeri’s gorgeously written memoir of his family, their flight from Iran, and his early years in the United States continues to provide some helpful perspective for our privileged children (as in, “Okay, but did you have to flee home with only one stuffed animal, which you then had to leave behind anyway??”)

The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers

If you have seen me this fall, you have heard about this remarkable book! To say that it’s a story of love, courage, and perseverance told from the viewpoint of a stray dog in Golden Gate Park doesn’t even begin to capture its power and beauty. My daughter and I listened to the audiobook version, performed impeccably by Ethan Hawke, which I’d recommend over reading the physical book — a first for me, but I can’t imagine experiencing it any other way.

That concludes this year’s list! What have YOU been reading and loving lately?

Herons and Forgiveness

I don’t know why birds so often show up in my life, and therefore in my writing. But they do, often serving as conduits for some sort of metaphor about life. Birds have a particularly Vermont association for me: Before moving to Vermont 13 years ago I lived mostly in suburban or urban spaces and rarely noticed birds. I was younger then, and didn’t have the time or curiosity to pay my avian neighbors any mind. I can’t say that I have more time now, but those birds keep breaking in on me.

Over the past 18 months, great blue herons seem to be following me. My house is situated between two streams, so it’s not unusual for me to glimpse a great blue heron standing gracefully atop its long legs in a stream bed. I’m always stirred by the beauty of these birds’ curved silhouettes. But in the past year-and-a-half, it’s great blue herons in flight that have burst repeatedly into my field of vision and stopped me in my tracks.

In case it’s been a while since you’ve seen a great blue heron, here are some quick facts: The average great blue stands about 4.5 feet tall, has a wingspan of roughly 6 feet, and weighs between 4 and 6 pounds. These are large birds. When you see one lift off and fly, if you’re anything like me, your first thought is, “Holy cow, that bird has no business flying! How does it do that?!?”

Until recently, I’d almost never seen a great blue heron in flight. Now, I see at least one great blue propelling itself across my field of vision every month. Sometimes they’re flying across my back field or over the trees alongside my driveway, but I’ve seen them all over Vermont. I’ve seen them in California. And one magical afternoon by the Nubble Lighthouse in Maine, I saw an entire flock of them flying over the rocky Atlantic coast.

Maybe they have been there all along; maybe I’m just noticing them now because I’m looking for them, like a self-fulfilling ornithological prophecy. Still, it’s gotten to the point where I’ve started to wonder: Is someone trying to tell me something? And not far behind that thought: Should I write about this?

I just wasn’t sure what, or how.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Some Labor Day Meditations

It was cool this morning when I walked the dogs, and the driveway is lined with the flowers of transition: goldenrod and New England asters. When I came back inside, I changed the wreath on our front door from the summer version (purple silk hydrangea flowers) to the fall (twigs and berries.) I spent much of breakfast talking to my children about Labor Day, which is today: why we don’t have a Labor Day parade (I suspect it’s because school has just started up and everyone needs the weekend to rest), why Labor Day exists (to recognize the labor movement and our nation’s workers), and why tradition forbids wearing white after Labor Day (apparently because some wealthy women in the 1880s decided to make an arbitrary rule to separate “old money” people from vulgar newcomers.)

Last week, two of my daughters and I started school: They went as students, and I returned to the classroom as a teacher for the first time in many years. This week, my three remaining children will go back to school. Given all the change that this entails — five children at five different schools (and in five different sports after school), two of those children starting at new schools, and me working full time – we are doing remarkably well. I sit here on the day that symbolizes the divide between summer and fall, and I am deeply grateful for my renewed sense of teaching as a vocation, and for this job that I love already; I am thankful that my children who have started school are happy where they are, and that my children who will begin school tomorrow are feeling ready and excited; and I am beyond fortunate to have a supportive husband and nearby grandparents who make these logistics possible!

But there is loss and there is pain in any transition, no matter how welcome or necessary the change. I am thinking of another type of labor on this Labor Day: the labor of childbirth. The most painful stage of labor – the moment I always thought, “I can’t do this one more second!” – is called “transition.” As excruciating as it is, transition is also the signal that the long-awaited baby is immanent.

Click here to continue reading this month’s column in The Addison Independent.

The Mystery Behind the Winchester Mystery House

Our family recently enjoyed an epic trip to California – a trip that lasted two weeks and spanned 6,500 miles as we traveled from Vermont to Montreal, Canada, flew to San Francisco, drove to Los Angeles, and returned to Vermont again by way of Montreal. We slept in five different locations and reconnected with numerous dear friends and family members.

The three days that we spent in the San Francisco Bay Area marked our first return to the region since 2016. The Bay Area is where my husband, Erick, grew up and lived until his college graduation; we’d lived there for half of our first decade of marriage and it’s where our first three children were born. We barely scratched the surface of our family history during this visit, but we did take our children to the Winchester Mystery House.

Erick and I had visited the Winchester Mystery House once, before we had children. It was shortly after we’d moved to Berkeley, something to do on a free Saturday when we were still exploring the new landscape we now inhabited. Come to think of it, we probably even slept late and then read the newspaper over brunch; we may even have watched an entire movie the night before!

The details of that first visit were fuzzy in my mind, but I still remembered the bizarre story behind the Winchester Mystery House. Here is the story as I relayed it to my children:

Sarah Winchester, who had married into the family that owned the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, moved to San Jose, California in the 1880s after the deaths of her husband and infant daughter. She was consumed with guilt over the people who’d been killed by Winchester rifles, and was told by a medium that she had to continually build a house for their ghosts; if construction ever stopped, she would have bad luck – or die (or perhaps both.) So, she bought an old farmhouse and began a 38-year construction project that ballooned the house to 500 rooms, complete with bizarre features like doors to nowhere, curving staircases with tiny steps, trapdoors, and walled-off windows. The building was, of course, never finished.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Looking Backward, Moving Onward

A couple of weeks ago, I spent the afternoon cleaning out the basement. Our basement is unfinished, cement floors and exposed beams, and it has become a repository of everything that we want out of sight.

We keep the off-season holiday decorations in the basement. Some toys that aren’t currently being played with but that may rotate back upstairs when our youngest child is older. Many bins of clothes that are either off-season or waiting for various children to grow into them. A couple of survivalist shelves filled with nonperishable food and medications; a reminder of our COVID days. Our cat’s food, litter box, and bed are in the basement. And, until a couple of weeks ago, there were piles of files.

These files were filled with school books and papers dating back to 2016, when our oldest daughter was 8, our youngest daughter was two, and our son was not yet born. In 2016 we began homeschooling our children while on sabbatical in California, and we kept homeschooling after we returned to Vermont: first two children, then three, then four.

In 2021 we began to stop homeschooling our children: first two children, then three, and after this school year there will be none.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Starlings in the Stove

It begins with a faint flutter, like a rustle of paper. Enough to make you stop and listen, wondering if you might have imagined it.

But the rustling repeats at intervals, growing louder as it gets closer. The dogs take notice, lifting their heads before running over to investigate. Still, you think, it might be nothing; it might go away.

Until the unmistakable beating begins, accompanied by a screeching sound like nails on a chalkboard. It’s not nails on a chalkboard: It’s the sound of a bird’s feet and wings struggling against a metal pipe.

There’s a Starling in the wood stove. Again.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Beautiful Things: The Eclipse

Since this is a semimonthly column, I’m in the awkward position of writing about the total solar eclipse two weeks after it happened. This may be far too late, given the pace at which we’re accustomed to receiving our news these days. On the other hand, given the quantity of news we’re accustomed to receiving these days, it may be excellent timing: It comes after the glut of eclipse images, stories, and reflections have faded. (Although, if you’re anything like our family, you still have eclipse glasses lurking in corners of your house and some eclipse cookies going stale on top of the refrigerator.)

Remember the total solar eclipse on April 8? How could I not make that event the final installment of my miniseries on the beautiful things of Addison County?

The eclipse took me by surprise on many fronts. It was a highly anticipated event that I didn’t anticipate, a big deal that I ignored – but it became a big deal despite my inattentiveness. I was vaguely aware of its approach about six months in advance, when some friends who live in Brooklyn told us that they were traveling to Texas in order to place themselves in the path of totality. That seemed like a lot of effort.

When my 13-year-old daughter, who gets wild-eyed with excitement about things like meteor showers and eclipses, started enthusing about the impending eclipse, I responded with caution: I honestly had no idea when, where, or at what time this eclipse might be happening. I didn’t want her to get her hopes up and be disappointed. I nodded and murmured some vaguely interested words. Did I do any research on the subject? I did not.

And so it was that I failed to realize what hundreds of thousands of people had apparently realized years earlier: That our section of Vermont would lie right in the path of totality on the afternoon of April 8.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Beautiful Things: Change

My 10-year-old daughter developed a love for gymnastics this year: She has spent the past six months taking back-to-back sessions of the gymnastics classes taught by the unfailingly patient Terri Phelps at the Middlebury Rec Center.

Last month I sat down at my laptop to register my daughter for her spring gymnastics class. I logged in to our family’s Middlebury Parks and Rec account 15 minutes after the registration had opened. Much to my surprise, the class I’d planned to register for was full already, but thankfully there was another option. With the click of a few buttons, my daughter was all signed up.

This rather unremarkable experience sent me spinning back in time to the way gymnastics registration used to be, when we moved to Vermont 13 years ago.

My three older children also took gymnastics at various points during their youth. Back in the “good ol’ days,” Middlebury sports registration happened in person. As I recall, it was always around 5 pm on a weeknight — a totally inconvenient time for any parent getting off work/wrangling children/preparing for dinner. Registration took place at the old gym and town offices, which were housed in a crumbling brick building that had been the first floor of the old Middlebury High School: When the top floor of the high school burned in the 1950s, a new high school was built across town and the town administration settled into the remnants.

A line began forming at least 30 minutes before registration opened, beginning at the folding table where the arbiters of our fates would sit and snaking down the dim tiled hallway. There was a lovely community aspect to this system: You’d see everybody you knew. On the other hand, everybody you knew was under extreme stress: We were all attempting to keep our tired, hungry children under control while haunted by the question, What if we reached the folding table only to find that there were NO SPOTS LEFT for our child in their desired activity? The disappointment of our children and our failure as parents would be on public display.

I don’t recall ever failing to sign my children up for gymnastics under the old, in-person registration system. Nor do I recall exactly when the system changed, although I suspect it was around 2016, when the old town offices and gym were torn down.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Beautiful Things: Haymaker Bun

The other day, an online newsletter to which I subscribe included a link to a blog post titled, “Eleven Adventures with my Teenage Girl.” Because I have more than one teenage girl, I clicked the link with interest – and immediately regretted it. This amazing mother wasn’t kidding when she called them “adventures:” She went hiking, rock climbing, and kayaking with her daughter. They took classes in leather bookbinding and aerial gymnastics, and went on a ghost walk.

In contrast, I consider it an “adventure” when I leave the house to do anything with my kids other than driving them to and from their various activities. And my adventure of choice has nothing to do with hiking trails, rock faces, or trapezes, although those things sound like fun and active things a mom should do with her child – a better, braver, more energetic mom than I. My favorite adventure with my children is to take them to breakfast at Haymaker Bun.

So, for the second installment of my series on the beautiful little things of Addison County, I am submitting an ode to Haymaker Bun.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.