The Slumber Party

When my oldest daughter turned seven last month, she requested a slumber party.

I’m not sure where the idea originated; she’d never attended a slumber party before. Sure, she’d spent nights at her grandparents’ houses. She and her sister once slept over at a friend’s house. We’ve had company come to stay, which often involves a few extra children sleeping on her bedroom floor. And because my daughter shares a bedroom with three younger sisters, one could argue that every night of her life is a slumber party.

But she wanted a birthday slumber party, with three friends from school. This is a girl who has a vision of her birthday party each year, down to the color scheme; she’s a force when it comes to celebrations.

As it happens, I have a fraught history with slumber parties. After a few innocuous sleepovers, when I was around my daughter’s age I attended what has become known as — in my mind — The Slumber Party From Hell. Not because it was a bad party, but because I behaved badly. I was not prone to bad behavior, but as an only child from a quiet, orderly household, I found slumber parties overly stimulating: More girls than parents! Whoo-hoo! At this particular party, I hoisted a large ceramic ball (a sculptural item belonging to my hostess’s parents) over my head in an attempt to impress my friends, which I inevitably dropped and broke. Then I laughed so hard that I wet my pants.

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent. (I promise this link will open; sorry for the “Subscription Only” limitation on yesterday’s feature. If it’s in the print version, apparently, it’s protected.)

Something New

A little something new today:

In November, I sat down for coffee with my editor at The Addison Independent — the local paper that runs my “Faith in Vermont” column in their online edition. The point of the meeting was to discuss how I could branch out a little, do a bit more at the paper.

Today, I’m happy to share the result: I’ll now be reporting regularly on some select stories for the Independent. These stories will run in both the print and online editions, and today the first of them, a profile of Bert LaBerge, hits the stands.

Aside from some tricky childcare juggling, this new reporting gig has been even more fun than I could have imagined. I’m an introverted person, so the idea of cold-calling people for interviews might seem terrifying. But as long as I can hide behind the “I’m a reporter for the Independent,” line, I’m fine. Then I get to ask questions, be nosy, put a story together. And the best thing: It’s not at all about me! Don’t get me wrong: I love writing this blog and my little column, but they’re essentially personal essays. They deal with what I did, saw, or thought. Reporting cuts me out of the story, which is a nice break for everybody!

So here’s my first piece of reportage: Bert LaBerge, a 74-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease who’s been slowly chopping up two big trees over at the Methodist Church. I probably won’t share all of my stories on this site (my next one, for instance, is about a new treatment at the local spa — probably limited regional interest in that one!), so you’ll have to look for them on the Indpenedent‘s site, but I’ll share my favorites — like this one. I feel like I lucked out getting this for my first assignment: everyone I talked to was just lovely, I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with Bert as he worked and while driving him to #1 Auto Parts so he could get a new spark plug for his Ranger, and it’s just an all-around good story. Enjoy!

(And local friends: You may now feel free to pitch me stories!)

Timber!

Since we bought our house in Vermont, a lovely Cape in the woods, our homeownership approach has been: Act first, think later.

This was certainly true when it came to the trees. “Oh look,” I exclaimed the first time we saw the house, “there are so many beautiful trees!” (We learned later that our neighborhood sits within the administrative boundaries of the Green Mountain National Forest; beyond our acre, the woods are protected by law.)

The trees are beautiful. They are important: alive and life-giving. We are big fans of trees. We’ve read The Lorax — many times.

But because we saw the house first in April, before there were leaves on the trees, we didn’t think about the leaves. Or the acorns. Or the lack of sunlight. Or the effects of leaves, acorns, and lack of sunlight on the roof and wooden decking. We didn’t question why there were massive trees two feet from the house (the prior owners had built an addition without clearing any additional space.)

Perhaps you can predict what I’m working up to here: This August, we had 20 trees taken down in our yard.

Click here to continue reading my “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

Riding for Home: Thoughts on Election Day

Because this column will run on Election Day, I feel compelled to write about local politics.

I typed that sentence, and then spent five minutes staring at my computer screen. The truth is, I’m terrified to write about politics.

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

The Disappeared

This is a ghost story, except that the ghosts were never living; they were things that humans built assuming they’d endure: roads, houses, towns.

I used to read with fascination about the disappearance of ancient civilizations. In a world where Google Maps allow us to access satellite views of anywhere we please with a mouse click, it seems incredible that entire cities — all those Biblical locales like Ur of the Chaldeans, or the settlements surrounding Stonehenge — could have simply vanished, returned to desert or grassland.

Well, that’s what happened thousands of years ago, when everybody built with wood, I reassured myself.

Until recently, when I realized that things still disappear. Even in Addison County, where change is slow and many buildings date from centuries past — where old houses become inns, old churches become houses, and old mills become shopping centers — things have vanished from both landscape and memory within the past 200, 50, even 10 years.

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

Mom Goes to Doe Camp

It started with fly fishing.

My daughters were asking to go fishing. Neither my husband nor I, both suburban kids, have any fishing experience aside from some childhood Girl Scout and Y Camp trips. I’ve been keen to learn, though, and felt particularly drawn to fly fishing which, in my mind, is associated with two of my favorite things: Norman MacLean’s gorgeous story A River Runs Through It, and Brad Pitt’s performance in the movie of the same name.

But, as I understand it, fly fishing involves hours of standing in water. It doesn’t seem compatible with being the mother of four young daughters. I decided to shelve it for a few years.

Then, on our anniversary, my husband handed me a tiny figurine of a doe. He was sending me to Doe Camp.

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

A Morning at the DMV

I spent the morning of my 39th birthday in the waiting room of the Middlebury DMV.

Here are a few things that you should know:

-The Middlebury DMV is a “mobile” DMV, which means that it’s not in operation every day. It’s open for business in the Middlebury Courthouse every Thursday, and alternating Wednesdays. That’s it.

-I needed to renew my driver’s license. And, since my license expired on my 39th birthday, I needed to renew it that day. (I found out later that I had a two-week grace period to renew my license, but I’m a good girl who likes to meet the deadline.)

-My birthday is on September 11.

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

The House that Electra Built

Just outside the town of Shelburne, an affluent Burlington suburb, a modest purple roadside sign reading “Shelburne Museum, Open May 9 – October 31” stands at the entrance to a parking lot with sweeping views of the hills bordering Lake Champlain. The museum itself is not readily apparent. Through the fence surrounding the grounds one catches glimpses of a red round barn, a lighthouse, a covered bridge, and – is that a steamboat?

The first impression is less a museum than the oversized miniature golf course of a putt-putting giant.

It’s a wonderful place to take children; in addition to exploring the lighthouse (which protected Lake Champlain’s Colchester Reef from 1871 to 1952, and was reassembled piece by piece on the Museum’s grounds) and the steamboat (The S. S. Ticonderoga, which served ports along Lake Champlain from 1906 until 1953, when it was moved two miles overland to its resting place on the Shelburne’s lawn), there’s a locomotive and rail car parked at the former Shelburne Railroad Station, a working carousel, the old Castleton jail, and The Owl Cottage, which is filled with dress-up clothes, toys, books, and crafts.

That’s only a fraction of what’s on view at the Shelburne Museum, which encompasses over 150,000 works of art and Americana throughout 39 exhibition buildings and galleries on 45 landscaped acres. It’s exhausting, which is precisely why the Shelburne is such a wonderful place to take children; one morning at the Museum, and they’ll nap all afternoon.

For three years, I visited the Shelburne Museum only in the company of children. I saw the same things repeatedly – the carousel, the Ticonderoga, the Owl Cottage – to the exclusion of most of the collection. So I never had time to wonder: Why?

Why this strange assemblage of buildings – barns, a one-room schoolhouse, a meetinghouse, and a roadside tavern — mostly from Vermont in the 1700s and 1800s, which were transported to the Museum in pieces and reassembled?

Why the eclectic collections: a 4,000-piece wooden circus parade, over 400 quilts, 225 carriages, 400 dolls, 900 decoys, folk art, 19^th– and 20^th-century American paintings, and Impressionist masterpieces by Degas and Manet? The Museums’s website boasts: “Shelburne is home to the largest U.S. museum collections of glass canes, trivets, and food molds.”

Why?

I finally asked these questions over Labor Day weekend, when my husband and I visited the Shelburne Museum alone to see what we’d missed in the company of our four young children.

The answer, as it turns out, is: Electra Havemeyer Webb.

Click here to continue reading about a fascinating character in my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

The New Playground

KidSpace4278.preview — The plan for the “New Kidspace.”

Middlebury’s Mary Hogan Elementary School got a new playground this summer. If you’re the parent of a young child, this is probably old news. I myself have taken my four daughters to what we call “The New Kidspace” on a weekly basis for the past month; they play on the playground while I gaze longingly at the school building and count the days until vacation ends.

The new playground is a welcome update. The “Old Kidspace” was erected back when I was in elementary school, when the height of technology was using Logo to move a pixelated turtle in a square on your computer screen. It was a splinter factory, constructed of wood and tires and heavy chains. If that sounds medieval, it was.

The New Kidspace is built mostly of plastic, which probably isn’t really plastic, but some sort of recycled composite material. It features two three-story tall towers, a series of ramps and walkways, multiple climbing walls, slides both twisty and straight, and ladders that rise perpendicular or twist around like double helixes.

After our first outing to the new playground, I asked my oldest daughter — who attended kindergarten at the Mary Hogan School last year and had daily experience with “The Old Kidspace” — to rate her experience.

“Is it better than the old playground?” I inquired.

“No,” she answered.

“Is it worse?” I asked, alarmed that my tax dollars may have been misspent.

“No,” she replied, “It’s just different.”

The next day, she was begging to return to the new playground.

And that, of course, is the essence of what it is to be a kid: Everything elicits awe and excitement. The new playground and the old playground are equally worthy, equally fun.

So my children, all four of them, give the new playground high marks. And me?

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

How Does My Garden Grow?

I’m an ambivalent gardener. This stems from my upbringing: As the only child of parents who have Miracle Gro running through their veins, I grew up observing the obvious pleasure that gardening bought my parents, along with the beautiful results. Weekends at our house were often spent in the backyard, where my parents’ tireless weeding, mulching, planting, and cutting turned our suburban acre into a verdant paradise.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time playing alone in that backyard, breathing in the fertilizer fumes, and I may have resented — just a tiny bit — the time that my parents spent focusing on the flowerbeds when they could have been driving me to the mall.

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