:: in a mirror dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

Telephone conversation today…

Call Center: “What organization are you calling from?”

Me: “The Southern Vermont Business Name”

Call Center: “What state are you in?

Me: “Vermont”

I really hope this guy wasn’t from America.

Thanks to some heavy rain and melting snow, our backyard is completely under water. That’s about one solid acre of land completely submerged. Our raspberry bushes are barely poking their top branches above the water line, the blueberry bushes aren’t doing much better, and the drainage pipe is gurgling away somewhere under the water.

During the really heavy rains I watched the water rise up to and beyond an apple tree and within a foot of our back deck. Fortunately our house is built on a hill and we should be in good shape.

Besides the tapped maple trees and the boiling of the sap in sugar shacks, it’s a terrible time to be in Vermont. Cold, wet, muddy, windy, need I go on? A lot of people are heading down to Florida for a few weeks just to defrost, dry out, and get a little tan before things do the same around here come May. As for us, we’re just holed up with movies, books, the radio, and the Internet. We’re holding out for the maple open house weekend at the end of March.

I attended the Arlington town meeting last night in the sweltering gymnasium of the Arlington Memorial High School. It was a solid 2 and half hour affair that covered school budgets, fire hydrants, emergency preparedness, special ballot initiatives, and legislation.

If you’re not familiar with town meetings, they’re a gathering of citizens typically before election day where they essentially have an opportunity to review the town and school board reports in order to grill their elected officials on their budgets, initiatives, past accomplishments, and future plans. This is a time for the tax payers to talk back in an open forum and to have a conversation with their elected officials. It also provides an opportunity for the elected officials to address these concerns, hopefully resolving them once and for all.

For the most part I was very impressed with Arlington’s town meeting. Though the high school tuition is rather high, it’s hard to know where to make cuts since the school has produced great results, earning awards over the past year for academic excellence. The school board did an excellent job answering questions with the one exception of computer costs. Apparently the school board is prepared to spend $1500 per computer for labs that will have close to 175 computers. Many residents jumped all over that, challenging them to consider other options since many computers can be purchased for $800. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Sunday morning the temperature hovered around 20 degrees. The snow was thin at best in our neck of the woods, but as Julie looked at our back yard she had an idea. Instead of strapping on skis or snow shoes, we laced up our ice skates at the edge of a huge frozen puddle in our back yard and went skating.

Read the rest of this entry »

Presidential candidate John McCain actually visited Vermont yesterday. Though I’m pretty sure he’s not getting my vote, it’s kind of nice to know he’s thinking of us, even if we were just a refueling stop on his way to see Romney in Boston. McCain has now been to Vermont more than George W., who has never visited Vermont in his eight years.

You’d think W. would want to at least take a ski vacation at some point.

I read through McCain’s talking points and realized it was the usual “blah, blah” of Republicans: cut taxes, small government, protect the sanctity of marriage (as opposed to the blah blah of Democrats: more jobs, more health care, and protecting the environment. To his credit, McCain tried to draw a bit of attention to Vermont:

“I will take my campaign everywhere,” McCain vowed. “I will not concede a single vote or a single state to my opponent,” former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He told reporters after his speech that if he’s the nominee he would return to the state during the fall campaign.

We all know that McCain stopped by to get a Vermont teddy bear for his daughter and Champlain Chocolates for his wife, but it’s nice that he tried to make it look like a campaign visit.

I have heard about community supported agriculture (CSA): customers pay farmers in advance for their produce and then share in either the bounty or the famine. It’s a great way to support local farms, and a relatively certain way to get fresh produce for a good price. I just heard a report tonight that Vermont restaurants such as The Bee’s Knees and Claire’s are experimenting with Community Supported Restaurants (CSR). As if we didn’t need another acronym.

The idea is pretty interesting. It’s kind of like micro-loans or micro-investing, only that it’s a community-based thing and you get your money back in food, not in…cash. The logic isn’t all that bad. We all want a nice restaurant in town that we can go to on a regular basis, even if we all can’t afford to go every week. So you gather those people together and get them on board up front. You’re paying for all of your dinners out for the next four years all at once. We do the same with fuel oil and propane, why not food? It seems like a win-win.

The best part is these restaurants are building better communities. They provide a place to hang out where local artists and musicians can show off their talents. It’s all part of the creative economy trend sweeping through New England to the point of saturation.

I think the key here is that local people are taking their destiny into their own hands and asking others to help them realize these dreams. They’re saying, “We want this kind of town and so do you. What’s stopping us from making it so?”

I visited the Yankee Magazine site for November/December and thought that I recognized the covered bridge on the home page… Wait a second, that’s the bridge 2 miles down the road from my house!

When you don’t have all that much going on in your home town, you have to build up what you do have (for example, Bennington, VT built a monument for a battle that occurred in nearby Hoosick Falls, NY and christened the one-day slug fest The Battle of Bennington). Arlington has one of the most beautiful and hence photographed covered bridges that just happens to be next to Norman Rockwell’s former home and studio.

So we try to make Arlington look pretty hot, even if it’s a has-been when it comes to the arts. But hey, I’m doing what I can to put Arlington back on the map.

You can read up on Arlington in the Yankee article. I drive by the bridge and horses shown on their site every day, so it feels pretty neat that Yankee is featuring my neck of the woods as a travel destination.

Unfortunately every day is not a “vacation.”

I almost canceled my subscription to Vermont Life magazine. The articles have consistently been excellent, but the layout was simply horrendous, making it next to impossible to read a whole article. One page may have had some pictures and a little text, and then the following pages were a blitz of ads with little bits of text clinging to 1/3 of the page, nearly falling into the gap in between the pages.

You know it’s bad when the state magazine has a worse layout than the town shopping guide. I felt like I had an advertising index with a pretty cover.

Seeing older issues only exacerbated the problem. In the good old days the articles were given full layouts with beautiful illustrations and pictures. The text ambled on throughout the following pages, as if placing all of an article together was an art practiced by the ancients, but lost to our modern times of advertising. Sure there may have been ads, but the content of the magazine won out. Such has not been the case of late.

And then the Winter 2007 issue arrived today. The new editor must have given the entire magazine an overhaul. The same gaudy ads were still in place, but the articles and photographs have been given a fresh look. The content is once again the king, and the words of the articles appear on consecutive pages. I can’t believe Vermont Life let things get to the point that I am excited about something so basic, so common sense.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of the magazine if you have a chance. The stories are always fascinating, taking a peek into small town life in Vermont, even if the southern part of the state is nearly nonexistent in its pages. I’ll forgive that sin.

It would seem that Vermont Life has rediscovered its roots. I will no doubt read through it rather quickly now that I don’t have to piece together the gig saw puzzle of articles. The article scavenger hunt days are over!!!

Technorati Tags: vermont - vermont+life

I work at a nonprofit organization on the side of a mountain, a fairly large mountain for Vermont. It’s roughly 3,800 feet or so high, and therefore the weather can be a bit different. In the winter we’ll have pelting snow, while my home in the river valley 30 minutes away has sloppy, sploshes of rain.

You wouldn’t believe it, but yesterday we began the day with dark dreary rain clouds, heavy downpours, late morning sunshine, and then a mix of rain and sleet in the afternoon. By the time I went home the clouds were pushing away and the sun was peeking through again.

In one day we had Spring, Fall, and Winter. In fact, we had all of those seasons within a few hours.

Technorati Tags: vermont - arlington+vermont

I’m ashamed to say that I have yet to notice that you can see the sunrise perfectly from our back porch. I don’t know why I haven’t ever taken a look since I’m usually awake when it’s still dark. In any case, I peeked out this morning since everything in the yard had a brilliant pink hue to it. I soon found out why.

I love going to the farmer’s market in the recreation park of Manchester, Vermont. I see people I know, have a chance to talk with farmers about their crops and animals, and am surrounded by youth and life. Kids do crafts in a sprawling tent area, while local musicians provide a cheerful backdrop.

More than anything, farmers markets raise the value of a community. People attend and have a chance to see just how many amazing things exist in their local towns. I never knew there were so many musicians and talented bread bakers in my area. Between Rupert Rising Bread, the Battenkill Bread company, and Granny Om Bakery in Shushan, NY, I can buy freshly made bread from any of these companies within a 30 minute radius of our rural home.

I love the chance to chat with farmers about how they raised the chicken that is now a frozen mass of meat in my bag, or with another about his wide variety of heirloom tomatoes. I have never felt so connected with my food. When I put food into my body there is a deeper sense of relationship and significance. I’m no longer just suffocating hunger pain, I’m fueling my body with good, local food.

Today is the last day of the Manchester market, but the Sunday afternoon market in Dorset, VT continues throughout the winter at the J. K. Adams kitchen store. Many of the same vendors will be on hand, and so the community sticks it out together through the winter.

My little Vermont town of Arlington is nestled in between the larger towns Manchester and Bennington, so we unfortunately do not have our own paper to report local news. However, if we did, the paper would record the following:

• A huge willow tree toppled over on Saturday due to high winds across from the Wayside General Store on route 313. It seems to have just missed a barn. The roots face the road so it’s super cool to see as you drive by.
• A bunch of Vermont Fish and Wildlife workers were working down on the Battenkill River by the Covered Bridge this week, leading to further speculation that the recent finding of bacteria (also known as “rock snot”) in the river could be a real big deal.
• On River Road a man in a small, white ranch house has been staying up late plotting the demise of the deer who ate all of the wild blackberries in his yard, to say nothing of the blueberries and raspberries.

Well, that last one may not qualify as local news, but I decided this week that if I was going to kill any animal, it would most certainly be the stupid deer(s) who ransack our yard, Bambi be damned. I think I’ll have to work on some kind of electric fence for next year. Then we may have some news …

Somewhere in Vermont or Eastern NY state there is someone with a huge decorative fireplace that used to be in our house. The previous owners of our home left it sitting in the living room; a full-size fireplace made for decoration only and sporting a nifty light bulb somewhere inside to give off some semblance of a glow.

It’s a truly ugly invention that I cannot imagine purchasing. Though the wood on the sides is in good enough shape, the rest looks fake, and the time it spent outside our house these past 3 months did not leave it looking all that flattering on the top.

I’d been trying to work up the gumption to take it to the dump, when the wise words of my father-in-law came to mind. “If you ever want to get rid of something, stick a ‘free’ sign on it and leave it by the curb. People can’t resist the ‘free’ sign.”

So I stuck a free sign on the fireplace after Julie and I hauled it to the road side. We live on a relatively quiet dirt road since it runs parallel to the main road, but we strategically waited until the weekend of Arlington’s town-wide garage sale.

All Saturday no one took the bait, though several cars slowed down to give it a look. On Sunday morning we left for an overnight trip at the family camp up at Lake George, returning on Monday evening.

We pulled in as usual and then Julie asked me, “Do you think the fireplace  was moved to somewhere else on our property or did someone actually take it?” Sure as shootin’, the fireplace was gone. I felt triumphant. The sign worked! Not only did we keep that hideous thing out of the land fill, we saved the cost of dumping it.

It’s with a sigh of relief that I can say we’re finally home in Vermont. Though the trip out to Indiana ran over 800 miles, the trip home topped 950 miles due to the IKEA and Barnes and Noble detours. After spending so much time on the road, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts.

Since we’ve eaten many meals on the road and did not have time to shop prior to hitting the road, I’ve realized that most rest stops have highly processed, packaged foods that made Julie and I feel sick more than once and created tremendous amounts of trash. Every cup of coffee or iced tea was something else to throw out, as well as the snack mix from gas stations or any kind of fast food.

After eating lots of fruit and veggies from local farms over the past few months, I noticed a huge difference in my body’s reaction to food on the road. I could hardly even look at soda, and pretzels were just about the only thing I could find to nibble on in most gas stations. The amount of trash we typically create at home is negligible when we’re only tossing our purchases into a canvas bag, rather than tossing every blessed scrap of wrapping from processed food.

One rest stop in New York state had a farm stand where we stocked up on fruit. I had just paid $2 for the lousy Starbucks coffee in one hand, and then paid $1.67 for the two plums and one orange in my other hand. I felt so stupid.

My plans for now include eating salad and whatever else we can find around the house. I don’t think I can stand looking at a bag of chex mix for a while.

I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so many blue berries in my life. It all began yesterday when we found a pick-your-own blueberry place that doesn’t use any sprays. We pulled in, grabbed a few colanders, and set to work.

My preferred method of picking was bush-wacking my way into a tight spot, holding the colander under clumps of untouched berries, and then tearing 3-4 down at a time. Quality control was tough, but I made excellent progress. We kept at it for one hour until our eyes crossed.

We drove away with 11 pounds of blue berries. They are now sitting in a huge bag in our fridge. Blue berries on cereal, in yogurt, on salad and whatever else we could find. The winner though was our homemade custard.

Being from Philadelphia, I’m an ice cream snob. The soft serve ice cream, known as a “creamy” in Vermont, tastes like blended ice to my refined buds. In Philadelphia we have frozen custard, a truly creamy, rich soft serve that may be the one thing Julie misses about living in Philadelphia. I grew up eating blue berries with custard and quickly won her over.

As a resourceful wife, she dug out our ice cream maker, loaded in the salt and ice, and then set to work churning her custard mixture. We took turns at the crank and soon had a bucket of frozen custard.

Dumping it into bowls we covered the custard with blue berries and went to work while sitting on our back deck. It was like being in Philadelphia again, just without the humidity and allergies from pollution. The best part is we have a yogurt container full of custard waiting in the freezer along with the remaining eight pounds of berries in the fridge.

Oh, and we had all of this after making a rhubarb pie the day before. I spearheaded the effort, but Julie led the charge. I am still amazed at the amount of sugar you need to keep it from tasting bitter. I’ve also had the Prairie Home Companion song in my head all day: “Momma’s little baby loves rhubarb, rhubarb, bee, bop-a rebob, rhubarb pie.”

We need to have company over soon before we eat all of this on our own.