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.
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.
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.
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.
For those who observe the Christian liturgical calendar, we are right in the midst of Lent. The Lenten season involves 40 days of preparation before Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending on the sundown of Holy Thursday. Lent is typically observed by reflection, repentance, and fasting, often characterized by a “giving up” of something. For instance, this year my eldest daughter gave up Starbucks (motivated, I suspect, less by the condition of her soul than by the condition of her wallet after buying $7 drinks post-school.)
This year, I’m observing Lent by taking something on as opposed to giving something up. The two practices are two sides of the same coin, really, since taking something on usually involves sacrificing precious time. What I’ve taken on is noticing one beautiful thing each day: anything that makes the world a little more beautiful. I record it in writing, and I’m compiling my daily reflections on beautiful things in a “Book of Beauty” for my family. It’s been a fun, enlightening, and sometimes challenging exercise.
I’ve decided to do something similar in this column: a series in which I highlight the beautiful things in our little corner of Vermont. After a season in which I delved into the difficult issues of middle age, change, and raising teenagers, perhaps it’s time for something a bit more hopeful – especially as we approach mud season after a particularly grey winter, as we approach the upheaval and unpleasantness of an election year, as we continue to grapple with the bad news of the world. You get the picture: We could all use a little beauty.
I’m going to begin with one of my favorite beautiful “secrets” of Addison County: Tri-Valley Transit (TVT.) Formerly known as ACTR, TVT was formed in 2017 when the public transportation systems of Addison, Orange, and Northern Windsor counties merged. It exists as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, funded by an 80/20 mix of state and federal grants and private donations. The mission of TVT is “to enhance the economic, social and environmental health of the communities we serve by providing public transportation services for everyone that are safe, reliable, accessible and affordable.”
I’m writing this at Lake Dunmore, where our family is spending a hot, humid July afternoon on the water. (Although I’m sitting in the stuffy minivan while our three-year-old, who fell asleep on the drive, naps in the backseat.)
As we were preparing to leave the house – sorting through swimsuits, gathering our children, loading the minivan trunk with beach toys, and filling up water bottles (which we forgot to bring), I felt…safer, more confident about releasing five children in water. You see, a member of our family is now a Red Cross-certified lifeguard.
That’s right: My 15-year-old daughter just completed lifeguard training and will soon be looking down upon the splashing masses at our town pool from atop the official lifeguard chair.
I can hardly believe it. This daughter took swim lessons and spent one summer on the town swim team, but in the nine years since then she’s shown no interest in swimming other than as a social activity. She is slight of build and not particularly athletic: Her passions run more to writing, music, and – if we’re being honest – shopping, grooming, and giggling with friends.
It’s precisely because she likes to shop and go out with friends that it’s important for her to have a job. During the school year, she spent one hour a week shelving books at our town library, but summer afforded the opportunity to expand her work horizons. The trouble was that her summer would be subdivided by two family trips, a week at camp, and a 10-day stint at the Governor’s Institute of Vermont for Global Issues and Youth Action. This ruled out many teenage-appropriate summer jobs that require a regular commitment, like retail, waitressing, or camp counseling.
My husband and I cornered her in late spring to review her job prospects. She sat across from us and, with calm determination, announced, “I want to be a lifeguard.”
It began on what I hope was the final snow day of this winter.
Snow days in our house begin with joy, as the teenagers realize that they don’t need to leave for school and can sleep late, and the younger children realize that their older siblings will stick around all day. But by the afternoon, with the seven of us ratting around the house, we’re usually a little stir crazy.
So on this particular afternoon, even though the snow was still flying horizontally, everyone went outside. The younger children grabbed their sleds, and my husband and I grabbed the dog for a walk – or an arctic stagger — down the driveway.
We’d just reached the mailbox and turned back towards the house when, through the swirling snow, we saw our eldest daughter coming out to meet us.
“Sooo, I was heading out to take a walk,” she began, “and when I opened the door Hermes ran in with something in his mouth. I couldn’t stop him.”
Hermes is our cat. Five years ago, our daughters discovered him and his four brothers in a dollhouse in their piano teacher’s attic, where they’d been stashed by their mother – a stray cat the piano teacher had taken in. Our girls, who felt a proprietary interest in these kittens, lobbied hard to adopt one. That’s why, despite two confirmed cat allergies in our household, we brought Hermes home. Those cat allergies are why Hermes became an indoor-outdoor cat.
But Hermes had never brought any animals into our house before. My husband and I walked back through the snowstorm as briskly as we could. The two main questions running through my mind were:
What KIND of animal was it? And was it still alive?
For a moment, it looks as if the weather might reshape another holiday celebration.
Like many others across the United States, our family’s Christmas was altered by the collision of a bomb cyclone and polar vortex, which brought gale-force winds and frigid temperatures to our corner of the world and knocked out our power for nearly two days. Thankfully, my parents, who live across town, never lost power. As the sun set on our cold, dark house on Christmas Eve, we packed up all our children, food, and gifts and unleashed Christmas on the grandparents. Sadly, our church never regained power in time for either the Christmas Eve or Christmas Day services; my children felt this loss more keenly than I expected, but we all adjusted. God knows we’ve all gotten used to adjusting since this decade began.
So when it begins raining as dark falls on New Year’s Eve and my already-exhausted children seem increasingly unenthusiastic about carrying on our tradition of attending Middlebury’s annual fireworks display, I prepare to adjust our plans yet again.
As it turns out, the rain slows to a manageable drizzle and we’re able to muster enough momentum to load everyone into the minivan and be driven very slowly by our 15-year-old (who just got her learner’s permit) to the elementary school.
This is where the peculiar magic of small-town fireworks begins.
“I think that November might be the most beautiful month,” said my daughter as we drove through the barren brown landscape. A few scraggly leaves clung resolutely to the skeletal tree branches. November, memorialized by Thomas Hood’s bleak poem (a long list of “no’s,” concluding with, “No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! – November!”) is usually far down the list of months ranked by beauty. This daughter turns 15 in two weeks, so she has a vested interest in finding goodness in her birth month.
And yet, I could see what she meant. The sky gets bigger in November without leaves in the way. The light is spectacular: The sunrises and sunsets become kaleidoscopic shows of orange and purple and are more conveniently witnessed as the daylight contracts towards the middle of the day. And, sorry Thomas Hood, but there are birds – the hardy ones who hunker down for the winter – and they’re easier to appreciate in the absence of competition: the brilliant blue jays, sinister crows, stern red-tailed hawks, and swooping murmurations of starlings.
Here is what I have been thinking about lately: Middle age is a lot like November.
The fall sports season is over. As always, it was brief but intense, with afternoons that felt like tactical maneuvers as my husband and I shuttled four children who were playing two sports (soccer and field hockey) on three teams. Gone are the hours spent huddled in a folding chair amidst the growing cold and dark, trying to divide my attention equally between the players on the field, the parents and grandparents on the sidelines, and my two-year-old son who’d run off with some surrogate big siblings he’d picked up. (Our family’s scoreboard for the season boasts not a single victory, but three tied games feel close enough.)
The garden was levelled by an early hard frost just as the zinnias and cosmos were at their peak. Now, when the golden autumn sun shines, I go outside and chop down the dead brown stems and lug them by wheelbarrow out to the compost pile like a botanical undertaker. There is still some hardy kale left in the garden, but I keep forgetting to cut it in time for dinner.
The foliage has been glorious, as usual: avenues of maple that glow red-orange, birch and poplar that spill yellow light like tree-sized buttercups. But yesterday I drove five children to and from the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier, and although the lovely drive took us across three mountain passes still decked in autumnal beauty, a 12-year-old in the car kept repeating, “This would’ve been a lot prettier last week.”
The sunrises and sunsets have been gorgeous symphonies in purple and orange: I know this because as the days grow shorter, my twice-daily dog walks often coincide with the rising and setting sun. Sometimes there is mist haunting the fields in the mornings, or the graceful cacophony of migrating geese overhead in the afternoons.
We have done our best to check off all the boxes: we visited the apple orchard and the corn maze, we bought mums and the pumpkins for our front porch, we decked the house in gourds and fake fall leaves, the Halloween costumes are ready to go. (Which reminds me that I still need to make pumpkin bread!) According to these metrics, our fall has been a success, but I am having trouble focusing. I feel distracted from the present moment, troubled by the vague sense that I’m always missing something. This morning, my 11-year-old daughter said, “I don’t know why, but I’m not really feeling excited about anything right now,” and I thought to myself: Me, too.
The Pickle Patch 