Happy Labor Day weekend to all:
“You shall LOVE your crooked neighbor, With your crooked heart” WB Auden
We’ve had a busy week in Mt. Holly, our home town. Summer is rapidly turning into autumn…see the leaf changes in the pix. The weather here has been Vermont perfect- with days around 75 and nights around 50…which is great, except we’ve had no rain for two weeks now, and the Dam POND is not making much progress in its return…see the discouraging photos. Stu has taken to running 10,000 feet of hose down there to try and fill it up for an hour day, which A- is like eating crumbs for dinner and B- takes all our water pressure to get down there, leaving us with no water in the house. Guess, we’ll have to wait for a good tropical storm to come through.
After my last dispatch last Sunday, we spent nine hours cleaning up the post excavation mess. Bob the Pond guy is a true excavating artist/fool, but he does not seem to have a watch and he does not really clean up…so we schlepped and dug and cut our way into semi-permanent stooped positions, until it looked back to semi-normal. Of course, we have put down a half acre of grass seed and mulch whim is undoubtedly wilting due to lack of rain. We may not really have THE POND until the spring! And, we did not account for enlarging the POND, with a huge apple tree that now hangs over it and is dropping its fruit into the limited waters. We cut it back as much as we can for this time of year, but more will have to wait until spring…in the meantime the returning frogs are delighted with the green balls ever falling into the murk.
On the ever present projects front, we had a surprise visit form Brian, the hippie electrician, who showed up unannounced after four weeks of trying to get him here. Like many Vermont, tradesman, he applied his Zen to our barn breaker box which had previously had a swarm of wires hanging every which direction and now we have a much improved system, which will only result in electrocution of you get within a foot of it. And yesterday, Jay and the Americans, our ADHD roofers show up to put in the barn roof, which is halfway done as we speak- see photos of backside. I’m hoping this will be our last home improvement project of the year…though Jenn is out there making lists and thinking about more gardens, paint and bedding.
By the way, on the topic of the joys of country living, our tractor has not started without a jump all summer and the deck has been mowing rocks more than grass- so we finally got around to that issue this week. Got the beast miraculously starting and ordered a bracket, which might keep the deck off the ground. Said bracket was three inches large and nine bucks an then took around seventeen hours to get on…but voila, Jenn is now a mowing fool.
We had two sets of BnB guests this week. Tom and Jerry (no shit) from New Jersey, who we spent a manic evening and morning talking to and around. She is nice Jewish girl from the burbs and he an Italian plumber whose dad was a painter for the Mob. They liked it so well here, they are now looking to buy a house down the road. Last night we had a couple an their aunt form The Netherlands. It was Marlene’s’ 30th birthday –and Jenn baked her a cake. We worked the community supper last night, so they arrived after we got home, and we spent a few very nice hours mulling about American work permits, living in greater Boston and why the Trumpster might be the end of the world as we know it. They went to bed, they got up, they left…the perfect guests…we love the Europeans…and especially those who don’t really speak any English. You can see the birthday pix and in the photo show.
Amidst all the projects, deadlines for a manual I am writing, side trips for work and day to day bedding decisions, we have been pretty house bound for weeks (more prisoners to the POND GUY)- so took of mid-week for a trek up to Middlebury. Another perfect day found us haunting Costello’s’ most famous Italian deli (mama looks like Mama Corleone and cooks like her). We found a walking tour of Middlebury which led us around in circles for two hours ..the chamber of commerce probably needs to hire someone new to do their tourist brochures…….and then headed up into eh mountain pass to the wonderful Robert Frost nature trail, whir we romped for a couple of hours and Stu recited “Stopping by Woods on a snowy Evening”, in fifth grade recital mode, at least six times. The drive back at dusk was illuminated by the wonder of leaves changing as we watched them.
So- we are in getting ready to leave Jay and the Americans to finish the barn roof today and we head up to Randolph for their annual Arcadian music festival. We are trying to find every opportunity to make nice with our Canadian neighbors, so when they build a wall to keep all of the trump-ites out, they will let us come live there.
Hope you are all having fun and thinking about us…..a lot…..
The Stu
