Greetings to all near and far:
It’s been a busy week here in the Mountains. Green has taken over the land, which is requiring much in the way of wackin’ and trimmin’. Big week on the sports scene as well…Go Cavs!!!, and I, as many of my contemporaries, mourn the loss of the great Ali, who filled our childhoods with excitement and panache, and provided fifty years of dignity to all our lives. RIP, Mohammed.
We have been out and around- went to a dinner on the ground last Saturday at our friend Robin Blue Skies (massage in the trailer girl), which provided a nice campfire with herbal scents everywhere. Lucy has taken to forlornly laying on the steps by the door to watch as the critters go by… with extreme longing for the chase. See her lounging photo along with the masterful carrot, which shows that in Vermont all vegetables have duplicate meetings-we think what we eat. Everybody seemed to have a party for Memorial Day weekend, since it is the official end of winter and a must to take advantage of the relatively short summer. We worked like dogs for the whole weekend; Jenn on her guest room remodeling project which she has been at for three weeks and me trying to keep us with the flowering growth and finally organizing the barns and figure out how to utilize fifty years’ worth of Walter’s tools and bric-a brac.. Finally got around to tackling Scum Pond, which is filled with algae and a million frog and tadpole eggs (slimy oozing globs of life that slip out of the strainer and have to be recaptured multiple times). My pond boy, Seamus, is a hard worker, but easily distracted by the primeval life force abounding in the scum, as well with Lucy’s lunging for hours after the frogs and other sordid creatures. She may quit stinking of pond by the fall.
We spent the better part of two days this week dealing with multiple car issues, after finding the local hippie mechanics down by the little airport. Not much in the way of frills or teeth for that matter, but seem to know their stuff, and we got both cars fixed over the course of two days; which resulted in ongoing back and forth trips up and down Rt. 103 between Rutland and Ludlow. We were actually on our way up to Middlebury to try a new hike (we got a new Vermont trail book, which we will compulsively try to complete every trail included therein) and my brakes started smoking at the bottom of the mountain before we even set off, which led us to the car shop instead of the trail. In between fixings, we managed to do a local hike on the Star Lake wildlife management trail, which turned out to be pretty magnificent short hike to a mountain meadow with views of all the ski hills in every direction. We walked back to the car through some nice people’s property (more Vermont 10th generation blue bloods with a million dollar view) and then past the gun shop in the woods where we ducked and made beeline for the safety of the car.
We got around this week to finding yard sites for all the tchotchkes we inherited from cousins Sherry and Joel, so we now have little yard things poking up from every garden (which are wildly blooming, by the way) and chimes hanging and jingling in all directions. This ads to our already symphonic mix of bullfrogs, tree frogs, crickets, the howling dog up the road and the occasional wild boar drifting by. I might add that you can see that the massive exercise unit continues to lay in a pile in the barn waiting for divine intervention.
We made our first trip in several years yesterday up to the metropolis of Burlington for their Discover Jazz Fest. Burlington is about ten times larger than the next largest hamlet in the state, and still really only a pretty small city….but it is HIP….lots of great dining and music and art and VERY cool people. Most people around here like to say that Burlington is wonderful and living there is almost like living in Vermont (this is a local joke). In any case, it’s a great 2 hour drive up and very easy to get in and out of. We found miracle free parking a few blocks from City Hall Park and hit the Farmers’ Market there for grazing, and then listened to three Jazzy bands from New York City, that were uber-Hip. The first was a combining of Dead like jam music with West African traditional and the last was a fifteen piece performance art-music outfit who were very URBAN. The setting was idyllic and we finished with a stroll down pedestrian only Church St. (has the mother ship of Ben and Jerry’s stores) which also has 2443 outdoor cafes one after the other…did I say it was HIP?. We walked down to a very lively Lake Champlain, with proms, weddings and river cruises…got to get out when the winter ends.
The drive home down lovely Route 7 was panoramic with the setting sun and Greens on the left, and the masterful Lake and the Adirondacks on the right. There is a section around Leicester (pronounced Leister) that may be the foulest smelling dairy country on the continent, but then it quickly turns into scented pine and flowers….really, the whole state is just HIP.
So now it’s a very rainy Sunday. Lucy is still passed out from a day in Festival and DOG heaven and I am being summoned to assist with THE room project (which I have managed to avoid for three weeks, as it included multiple bedding issues)….so see you soon.
Peace, love and stay HIP.
Stu
