Vermont Views Magazine

Home Page

TENT and SLEEPING BAG DRIVE.pdf.jpg - Google Drive.webarchive

PHOTO OF THE DAY

Videographer

Photo by Phil Innes

A Native American videographer shooting footage of the annual Spring Morris Dance for Brattleboro Public Television.

OLD LADY BLOG

Change of Season

Toni Ortner

March 19, 2021

Hope floats in the air as people are vaccinated against Covid. Spring is coming, and more people are out on Old Route 5 south walking either alone or with friends although we still wear masks and keep a six foot distance.

I stand in front of the Beatrice Aiken Conservation Preserve to admire my favorite boulder which has the face of a smiling Buddha. Above it there is layer upon layer of huge boulders. I go online to geocaching.com and learn that a volcano once erupted here, and the fallout ash fell into an ancient ocean and mixed with the sediment. The boulders were originally lava. Then the rock was buried underneath subsequent rock and subjected to high pressures and temperatures causing the rock to recrystallize. Over a long period of time the constant movement of the earth’s crust thrust these boulders from horizontal to vertical position. That is why they tower so high.

Read More of this and other articles by Toni Ortner >>>

WRITE WALK

Straitjacket Emotions

Susan Cruickshank

She bellowed like Chewbacca, guttural, and LOUD. It always amazed me how loud someone so petite could be. Even when she was wearing her large hearing aids, which hung off her protruding ears, ears that looked like two tiny teacups, the high decimal sound that emanated from her mouth made it clear that she had no awareness of her screeching volume. And yet, she could see the wincing of others that her ear-piercing vocalizations produced, and I suspect her choleric temperament appreciated the immediate effect of her words.

Kelly O’Leary* was developmentally delayed and deaf, but she liked to pretend that she was just hard of hearing.

In her early 60s, she dressed like she was heading off to the mall with her high school friends. But instead of picking up a bottle of hair dye as an act of rebellious expression, she needed it to cover up her grey roots. And when a hearing person spoke to her, she nodded and smiled as if she had heard and understood every word, when those who knew her, knew she had understood nothing.

She had a boyfriend who was also intellectually delayed. He was bush-man handsome with a scruffy beard. Charming, if he didn’t talk. Michael* didn’t speak in words. Instead, he had a moaning grunt.  He had no interest in the relating aspects of a committed relationship; rather, he wanted a girlfriend so he could bury his head between warm breasts on the dance floor at the monthly sock hop.  But if truth be told, he would have preferred to be alone in his room lying on top of one of his girly magazines.

<Extract> Read More of this and other articles by Susan Cruickshank >>>

Finnish Fandango

APRIL 26, 2021 – 35 YEARS AFTER CHERNOBYL

Anneli Karniala

On Saturday April 26, 1986, I do not remember exactly what I was doing at our row house in Århus, Denmark. Maybe cleaning up, going food shopping, or playing a board game with the children. But certainly not considering, or even being aware of, any inherent national danger. The children were 13,12, and 5 at that time, and it was my 12th year living in this safe Scandinavian country.

Little did I, or any others living in Denmark, know, that on precisely that day, April 26th, there occurred a nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at the city of Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, about 1900 km away..... It was just life as usual for all of us in Denmark, both on that Saturday the 26th as well as on Sunday the 27th.  

Why didn't we know anything immediately on April 26th? 

Firstly, because the Soviet Union withheld the crucial information about the explosion in the nuclear reactor --- withheld that day even from the inhabitants of that area in the Ukraine. Secondly, it took 2 days for the wind to carry the radioactivity to Sweden.

Why Sweden? 

The Swedish power plant was the first outside of the Soviet Union to detect radioactivity from the blast. It was on April 28th -- 2 days after the nuclear explosion -- that Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant on the east coast of southern Sweden, about 1000km from Chernobyl, had alarms go off indicating high radioactivity on their monitors. Investigations quickly showed the radioactivity was NOT from Forsmark, and was publicized internationally. And this forced the Soviet Union to publicly acknowledge the nuclear disaster, after having covered it up to the rest of the world for 2 full days. 

Extract Read more of this and other articles by Anneli Karniala

A Cautionary Horror Tale

Margot Harrison, The Glare. Hyperion, 2020

Reviewed by Laura Stevenson

Hedda lives on a small ranch in Arizona with her mother. They have goats and chickens, a garden, books … but no "glare," Hedda's word for anything to do with computers, iPads, and iPhones. She knows the lack of technology in her life has something to do with a computer experience that left her "off kilter" when she was six. She also remembers that a baby-sitter she was fond of poured drain cleaner in her eyes because of something dreadful she saw on a computer, and still insisted, "I can still see it!" But she doesn't know the whole story. She is about to find out; her mother is going to spend a month or two nursing a friend who is dying in Australia, and for the first time in ten years, Hedda is going to spend time in San Francisco with her father, step-mother, half brother—and the world of the glare. Her mother is clearly worried about her and has made her father promise to expose Hedda to computers as little as possible. Hedda resents that protectiveness; she's sixteen, fully in enough control of her life to prevent herself from going "off-kilter" in the real world. She even plans to persuade her father to let her go to high school rather than continuing the home schooling she's used to.

<extract, read on>

Read the full review and other reviewed titles in this column.

The Devil in the Valley — Castle Freeman, Jr.

Vermont Exit Ramps II — Neil Shepard and Anthony Reczek

Half Wild: Stories — Robin MacArthur

A Refugee's Journey: A Memoir — Walter Hess

Vermont Non-GMO Cookbook — Tracey Medeiros

Robin MacArthur, Heart Spring Mountain.

Jackson Ellis, Lords of St. Thomas

Chris Bohjalian, The Flight Attendant

Beth Kanell, The Long Shadow

Kimberly Harrington, Amateur Hour: Motherhood in Essays and Swear Words

Jessie Haas, Rescue

Toni Ortner, Writing Shiva

Tony Weldon, Drunk in the Woods

Aesop Lake, Sarah Ward

The Animal One Thousand Miles Long: Seven Lengths of Vermont and Other Adventures. Leath Tonino

URBAN NATURALIST

Killdeer

Lloyd Graf

A Killdeer skitters,

Wing-droops, squeaks piteously.

I love those  Killdeer

Yes Killdeer have been a source of delight to me for most of the past 60-plus years,  Since the 1950s when I prowled pastures maintained by what was then Camp Detrick near my Frederick MD childhood home, I have more than enjoyed encounters with these smallish, incredibly spiffy plovers in meadows, vacant lots, farm and athletic fields and mudflats everywhere I've lived and most places I've visited from MD/Boston/NYNY to Chicago/Cincinnati to  the San Francisco Bay area  'Their presence was often revealed from a distance by unmistakable plaintive high-pitched piping vocalizations emanating from cover or from elegant pointy - winged flight suggestive of both small falcons and Nighthawks..They also traveled nimbly on the ground, sprinting rapidly for short distances then "freezing" in place, an element of their foraging strategy for insects and other small prey.  Seen close up Kildeer are sartorially splendid.  Landlocked lifestyle notwithstanding, their double black neck rings against a pale background go together with black caps to somehow create a nautical impression, and they are very shipshape craft indeed.  

When I moved to Brattleboro my natural expectation that Killdeer would be abundant in the area was buoyed by 1990's encounters a mere 27 miles up the line.

Extract Read More of this and other articles by Lloyd Graf

Sending Love To Findhorn-

A Tribute to The Community Center

and The Main Sanctuary

Elizabeth Hill

Life is full and overflowing with the new. 

But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter. 

~Eileen Caddy

April 12, 2021: The Monday morning news from Scotland on social media hit me like a mac truck! In the middle of last night, a local middle-aged man burned to the ground two iconic buildings in the The Park at Findhorn—The Main Sanctuary and The Community Center. 

Immediately, my heart transported me back to that majestic place where I lived from 1996-2000, standing outside between the Community Center and the Sanctuary, helplessly watching both buildings, overwhelmed by furious flames that lit up the night, and melting them both to the ground. Flooded with memories and emotions, tears flowed in grief and sorrow when I saw the destruction. 

Thankfully, though, no one was hurt.

During the two last years as a Findhorn community member, my work station was The Park Kitchen inside The Community Center. Oh, how I loved those days of singing, dancing, and co-creating as we prepared each meal for the community and the many guests from around the world. We met and worked with new guests weekly, which allowed us all to learn and exchange new songs and dances from many different parts of the globe. 

Extract... Read More of this column and others by Elizabeth Hill >>>

Bath

Nicola Metcalf

I soak in the tub with a homemade bath bomb given to me for Christmas. There are flecks of things:  petals of lavender, sweet birch, and calendula, floating around, oily and nourishing. These bits and the hair I have just shaved off my legs cling to the sides of the tub like high tide line at the beach. 

I go to scrub my feet with pumice stone, something I rarely take the time for but is needed. They are dry with a crust of dead skin, starting to crack in one spot.  As I start in, one big toe looks so pink and happy to finally get some loving care and attention. This makes me smile, a big deal on a day like today. Next I delight in my big brown bush, gently laced with gray, a soft cushiony triangle swaying in the cloudy water.   It’s a generous thing.  stalwart, proud, and loyal. A friend. I remember my mother cautioning me in a conversation about pubic hair. “Enjoy it while you have it” she said in a tone of disappointment tinged with resentment. It will leave me too someday, but we’ll always share fond memories. 

Lastly I examine my belly where the flesh is loosening. Grabbing small handfuls, pushing and pulling it this way and that. Today I contemplate a development there, a pasture of new growth. Little red dots and small light brown bumps with rough tops:  cherry hemangiomas and seborrheic keratoses. Tiny for now, these will deepen in color and size as time goes on. I find it unattractive. I don’t want to say goodbye to smooth skin. But two out of three ain’t bad. I will have to come back to the pasture on another day. Maybe with a picnic basket and blanket, I will consider the landscape again with a kinder view.

<extract> Read more of this and other columns by Nicola Metcalf >>>

Becoming Calm in the morning

Charles Monette

Last cold day of winter.  March 8th.  Looked promising, a mostly, mostly calm sunshiny day!  Temps would surely rise.  However, as I reached the trailhead this morning it was a cold 27 degrees.  Sun was up bright!  Still wearing my mad bomber hat, my long herring-boned wool black coat and 33 below wear below, I put my grippers on.  Gloves, a Pennington shirt, cord pants, a bottle of water, pen and notepad completed the outfit.  Ready to be calm.

I moved slowly, testing my grippers on the frozen trail.  Patches of snow & ice surrounded me.  Looking about, the forest floor was littered with pine branch twigs.  A fan of green needles affixed to many ends.  These had most assuredly blown down, and about the week before.  Those ‘in like a lion’ winds.  Some gusted at 39 mph.  A wind advisory had been in effect.  Did anyone warn the pines?  Wind chill factors calculated below zero!

Yet the beech leaves were holding on.  I couldn’t help but smile.  Guess they’re waiting for the warmer weather to drop.  Without fanfare, they have a way of going with the blow.  I gave a nod to recognize their steadfastness, and placed one foot in front of the other.  I was trying for a relaxed gait, wary of the ice on the trail, but not letting it dictate my pace.  Up hills were traipsed with more assurance.  Slight ups and downs elicited a more comfortable walk-like stride that grew stronger as I relaxed into it.  Walking calm.

“Anything on the path can be used for realization.”

            LO JONG TEACHINGS (TIBETAN TERM)

<extract> Read more of this and other articles by Charles Monette >>>

What we can learn from moths

Steve Minkin

Every spring and early summer when I'm riding my bike in the direction of Vernon, there is a backwater just before heading up Cotton Mill Hill where I see a turtle. It is never the same turtle; in fact, it usually starts out quite small and grows during the summer. I have tried for years to get a good picture of the turtle without success. The reason being, I have discovered, is that turtles can read peoples’ minds. I mean this quite literally!  They can read my mind the moment I think I want to take a photograph. I've tried various different approaches, but the moment I slow my bike down, they splash back into the water. Sometimes I cycle by the spot pretending I'm not looking at the turtle in the hopes that if I park further down, I might be able to sneak up and get a picture.  I’ve been very close, but by the time I found the branch in the water through the lens of my iPhone, the turtle was gone. That said, I am always thrilled to see the next generation of turtles.

This is part of a larger lesson I have been learning over the years regarding how little we really understand the lives and consciousness of all the creatures inhabiting the world around us. The best way for us to be stewards of the planet’s biodiversity is to follow the rule, “first do no harm.” But how can we know when we're helping, and how can we know when we're harming.

Patience! Years ago, a giant moth taught me an amazing lesson in Bangladesh. I was working there with a local organization on environmental restoration of the floodplain. On this particular occasion, we were staying in a government guest house near the town of Tangail. [Illus. Atlas Moth, Bangladesh]

<extract> Read more of this and other columns by Steve Minkin >>>

THE FIRST GLASS

Splice

Vincent Panella

           You don’t join two independent clauses with a comma. It’s not strong enough; it needs a conjunction for help; it lacks the stopping power of a semicolon. However, when confronted with a pair of independent clauses, the writer must do something, for without a connector of any kind, you have a “run on” – perhaps equally offensive. These rules apply more to essay or academic writing. Read fiction and they’re violated time and again; but for formal writing, the rules of grammar apply, usually.

            In my freshman year I had an English teacher named Dr. Goodfellow. In those days tenured faculty — not TA’s — taught the core courses. Dr. Goodfellow was aptly named, soft spoken but strict, three-piece tweed suit every day, in winter a yellow V-neck under his vest. He spoke the kind of English we were supposed to write. In his class we read Profiles in Courage and Huckleberry Finn, the last a rich source of assignments for Friday’s in-class themes. These were returned the following Monday, critiqued in detail and with a letter grade.

            At the time I thought highly of myself as a writer, especially after my senior year in high school when I received an A in English and was encouraged to write by a teacher whose name escapes me. She started off my love of writing with a take home assignment: we were to write an essay called My Pet Peeve.

<extract>  Read More of this and other articles by Vincent Panella >>>

ARCHETYPAL HIPPIE SPEAKS

The morass mind

Jeri Rose

<extract> The fear, the authority mandating distance, arresting anyone daring to mingle with others for any other purpose than buying things in corporate dispensing-of-goods-temples are arrested. The masks that are like a chainlink fence to a swarm of bees in effectiveness of a wall one president proposed to stop an influx of people we are to fear as criminals from a poor country hoping for some financial help without me denying that some indeed may be criminals wanting more than help but the fulfillment that pirates and all such robbers seek. Fear as power to make an atmosphere that the morass mind deems true the witchcraft notions that got women burned alive at the stake.

               Despite the overwhelming power and conditioning and acceptance that makes up this respiratory damper of atmosphere that is destructive of brain with diminished oxygen for the greater amounts of carbon dioxide we must intake with these masks, a large portion of the population does not accept the conclusions that the media spews from the authority that it supports that had it behaving like a pack of hyenas taking down the president with a universal hate that exhibited itself in words that prove the conspiracy in the complicity in the exact repetition of words ( vibration of air on  our airwaves) on channel after channel of those who are supposed to be reporting reality not a point of view mandated by some source wealthy enough to own them all.  Trump’s wealth nothing compared to the hoard of lucre that has stolen our airwaves from We the People.

               Trump’s People and Bernie’s People had one major connection that they breathe the same air of knowing that the system is wrong. Neither Trump nor Bernie knew enough. I admit I saw Bernie as the better man. My bias, full disclosure.

<extract> Read more of this and other columns by Jeri Rose >>>

MONKEY’S CLOAK

UNDER a GREY SKY

Julia Ferrari                      

Trees sway under a grey sky

Wind pushing leaves 

Cooled by shade

Light and dark all day

I hear my voice softly even-ing out.

Smoothing out its tensions,

Its fears.

The path as tightly wound as the brittle ice 

That surrounded me,

Inched me in,

Almost ended me. 

But now snows have melted

And the fragile world has thawed

Turning shades of pale and deepening green

Covering every inch in vibrating textures

gently moving

gently alive.

  Julia Ferrari

 (© 6/14/18)

Read more Monkey’s Cloak

IN BETWEEN

Covid 19, Civil Unrest and the Deeper Healing of the Planet

Julia Ferrari

One of the things I find myself asking in this time of great upheaval is “What is its purpose?” Having gone thru personal upheaval when I lost my husband and business partner, I have felt that abyss under my feet before… the feeling of  not knowing what will happen, what the future will hold etc. During that time the regular world was moving at its regular pace, but for me, everything had changed, everything had altered and my usual world had stopped. I ambled along in a disbelieving fog, unable to see the path, unable to understand what had happened—how could my normal life be gone in an in start?

This current world drama of a rampant novel virus and civil unrest that very few of us (excerpt for some scientists and civil leaders) had expected or anticipated has left us flat footed and afloat in this new world of unreality.

After being in seclusion for a few weeks alone after the first signs of Covid in March, I went out to get groceries and began to see what major changes we were undergoing. This has continued for almost a year and as far as I can tell there are many reactions to the disruption: to blame and feel anger, to stay in shock and fear (buying excess supplies or guns) or we can feel it in its rawness and have that change and heal us. 

For me after a great loss I choose to feel it all, to open my heart to the pain, rather than push those feelings down. That was not always easy…it hurt, but I believe that was my path out of limbo and back into really appreciating life. William Irwin Thompson said in his book “The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light”; We are all on edge. Human beings feel safe and secure when they can stand comfortably in the center of things, either in the center of an age or in the center of a class of people with a common word view but when they come to an edge, they feel nervous and unsettled. There, at the edge, we see familiar things end and something else begin…”

Extract Read more Julia Ferrari

OPEN MIND

"Automated Lottery"

Offie Wortham

The proposed "Automated Lottery" would raise 10 times more money for our public schools!

Wouldn’t it be nice to receive a message on your phone or computer that told you $50, $100, $1,000, or even $35,000 had recently been deposited directly into an account you have in a local bank? When we asked the creator of the proposed “Automated Lottery” at his home in Johnson, Vermont how this system would work he gave us some of the details of this revolutionary development which he believes will eventually be used worldwide.

Seven states are now allowing the purchase of lottery tickets on-line. All states are expected to do the same thing in the near future, as well as many countries. We can now purchase lottery tickets from our home 28 days in advance. You can use a credit card, or you can also pay with your Bill Pay from any bank. This is what many people use to make their car payments, auto insurance, church donations and many other things. It is setup easily from home or by going to your bank. When programmed to pay a certain amount on specific days, payments are made for any period of time, from a week to over a year. It can be stopped at anytime with a phone call.

Research has shown that it is better to play the same number every day rather than jump around hoping for more success with a different number. Statistics prove that using the same number gives one a much better chance of winning. Therefore, a person should pick one number and stick with it for at least a year.

<extract>    Read More Offie Wortham >>>

WRITE ON !

A Golden Age of the Written Word – Brattleboro 1995-2004

By Steve Minkin

What is it that makes our town feel so special? As an immigrant to Brattleboro there were certain markers such as the welcoming physical appearance of an old town with historic buildings framed by Wantastiquet.  The gateway to Vermont always felt to me as if it had a singular richness distinct from communities just across the borders to the South and East.

When I lived in Greenfield, Brattleboro was a mecca for young alternative life-style families who came to dine on vegetarian food and have fun at the very child friendly Common Ground. There were the art galleries downtown, a welcoming place – where people said ‘hello how are you’ to one and all and yes, on Flat Street – the wonderful adventures of shopping and putting in member hours at the Coop – then a very small oasis.

My first visit to the town was back in 1965 when much of Putney Road was still farmland. I was on my way to India via the Experiment in International Living. In many ways Brattleboro seemed more exotic to someone with a New York mindset than was the destination I was flying to halfway around the world.

I moved to Brattleboro in the 1990s, from Greenfield after living in England and Bangladesh and two years teaching at the University of Iowa. I remember walking to the Brooks Memorial Library on my first weekend as a resident and ‘lo and behold’ a group of authors and poets that included Veranda Porch, Arlene Distler, Karen Hesse, and Martha Ramsey were sharing their work which frankly ‘blew me away.’ I had taken up writing poetry in Iowa after a long hiatus and I marveled at the sense of community among writers living in my new adoptive home.

<Extract>

Read More of this article >>>

AN A-MUSING LIFE

Candles and Covid

Nanci Bern

I light 2 menorahs each night of Chanukah. One is the traditional House of Hillel (what we were taught in Hebrew School) way that increases the number of candles each night. The other is according to the House of Shammai that decreases the candles each night. I have been doing this for years.

Rabbi Hillel’s practice is "Ma'alin Ba'Kodesh ve'ayn Moridin,”: “One increases in matters of holiness and does not diminish.” From small to large you are creating unity by joining one light to another expanding together. Rabbi Shammai goes in the opposite direction. The potential is all there on the first night. We decrease to create a unity of the many who have become one.

The light of Chanukah expands and contracts. Each night we kindle the cadence of its spirit. Candles and oils bring menorahs to fullness of energy whichever direction they go. Their flames dance with our prayers. This is the grace that Chanukah gives us. The light glistens as it swells and reaches toward the infinite, and then contracts to its center. Menorahs working in tandem like this illustrate the spiritual meaning of this holiday for me. Just as consciousness needs to move, light needs to expand and contract in order to thrive and keep in balance. It can’t be day or night all of the time. We need them both. This dynamic is part of all life.

Friends have become accustomed to my taking up more room on the table as we have gone from home to home to celebrate together bringing our menorahs with us. Now they would feel something were amiss if I did not bring them both.

But this Chanukah will be different. <extract>

Read more of this and other columns by Nanci Bern

I got Covid

Rob Mitchell — Murfreesboro,Tennessee

  Yes. I will admit it. I had Covid. I thought I was cautious. I locked down my office to outside visitors. I installed temperature stations and hand sanitizers. I WORE A MASK!

Yet, still I did a stupid thing. I attended a visitation for someone I had worked with in the insurance business. There were over 1000 people there. Still, I wore a mask, washed my hands and I was exposed when I dropped my mask and shook hands and gave my condolences.

That was a Wednesday. I was tested on Sunday but only because my wife insisted. I had no fever and just a stuffy nose. The doctor's office was as shocked as I was that I was positive. Monday, I didn't feel so well at all. My wife God bless her also tested positive but never had a fever and really never felt bad.

My fever for the next week hovered around 102 degrees. I was told to hyper dose on D3, Zinc, Vitamin C and drink lots of fluids. All I wanted to do was sleep. I was not hungry. I was just tired and my bones felt like they were being crushed. Not a great feeling at all.

I bought an O2 saturation monitor and over a week watched as my oxygen level dropped from 94% to 85%. Anything under 90% they want you to go into the hospital. I just toughed it out. I coughed a lot and stuff which could be described( but shouldn't') came out of my sinuses that made we concerned that brain matter may be leaking out.

Yes, I know there are those who say 98% of people testing positive recover. I'm glad to have made it into the 98%. I was not happy to catch it or expose my family to it. Thank God none of them were impacted to a great extent.

Only an idiot would not try to protect themselves and their loved ones. Only an idiot like me would let down their guard and potentially endanger the lives of those I love. I never thought Covid was a hoax or was not dangerous. But we have to remember to always play defense when you don't understand your opponent. You may still lose the game but hopefully you will play a full game and not end up a victim to a "fool's gambit"

<Extract> Read more of this and other letters to Vermont Views >>>

OPEN MIND

No excuse

by Offie Wortham

It is time we stopped blaming the vast differences in test scores and graduation rates on the educational system alone. Check the differences out for your local schools and colleges nationwide on GOOGLE. Elementary and high schools where 100% read at the expected level, and others only 25%. Community colleges with a 25% graduation rate, and selective colleges with a 95% graduation rate.

If an elementary school teacher is blessed with students who can read and write before kindergarten isn’t their success rate going to be better than the teacher assigned a room full of students who come to school hating to read and only want to be rap stars or rich athletes?

Isn’t it time we agree that the problem begins in the home, and not anywhere else. Some people are better role models and educators for their children. This is a fact.

Poverty and low adult educational levels are not excuses for the performance of children in life and in school. Many of our greatest leaders and citizens have risen out of great poverty. Institutional racism and sexism cannot be used as the primary reasons for lower grades or poor demonstration on a job."

Read More of this column >>>

#8•Don’t ask what your country... grow up!•

A shut-down column for the Plague Year 2020.                    

The third local supermarket didn’t have any either, but like the other two it had hundreds of types of bottled water — but not one Brita filter replacement.

It had filtered water, spring water, water from France and Italy, and of course that low carbon bottle from Fiji.

Previously all three markets had had Brita-type filters, a simple carbon-filter inserted into a jug, but now none. Amazon had it.

It’s no use looking to the government to legislate that stores of a certain size must carry filters, and it’s no use either complaining about billions of plastic bottles in the land-fill, or getting recycled or going straight into the ocean.

This is something we can take care of ourselves in our town by asking stores to carry the item, and if they don’t buying from Amazon and telling everyone about it.

<extract> Read more Dairy Home Companion

Pandemic Journal

An Introduction to the

Graphic Journal Slide Show

Linda Rubinstein

For many, a journal is a private place. Perhaps you can recall that the leatherette-covered diaries we kept as children came with lock and key. It was as close to a mental “room of one’s own” that we  could muster at ten or twelve years of age. It was where we recorded our pain and plans, our crushes and hopes, and our observations.. But a child I no longer am.

What drives my decades old practice of keeping word-and-image journals? I began in the late 1970’s during a four month stay in Pamplona, Spain. I needed an outlet for the challenges of living in another culture so I bought a sketch book and began to draw. Once this creative pathway opened, images started pouring out. That early work was all personal, done for me. I came home to find a new genre had surfaced—Artist Books—my muse had found her home. And so, starting with the comfort of the personal, I began the Pandemic Journal.

<extract>  Go to Pandemic Journal by Linda Rubinstein to watch the slide show>>>

What about your contribution?

Phil Innes

There is  a wicked inclination in the current age to skip personal responsibility and blab on in the newspapers at extraordinary length about the failure of the Fathers — a Freudian dream-cast of projections about fathers and authorities. Not only does the government get it in the chest for promising things which no twelve year old would credit possible, but no fifty year old would credit as even desirable. Doesn’t matter if you are Left or Right to understand this.

This used to be a community where citizens who had the wherewithal that took responsibility for those who had not. It was not desirable that government should fix things in Vermont when citizens could do as well or better themselves, and volunteerism was a part and even expected part of the social scene. Second-home ownership has not helped in this with Vermont being the second highest state in the Union for second-home ownership, including 81%, Quechee with 69% and Proctorsville.

But for those who live here regularly the time to have volunteered a contribution and get an orientation to it was last year. With some sort of acknowledged and sometimes measured training toward being competent in a skill, plus a regular attendance at a critical forum which makes a difference, a couple of months training at a few hours per week would have qualified anyone to attend on emergencies rather than wax large about the paternal and inadequate government in the newspapers, however efficient the government is, since the government cannot govern what the citizens are unwilling to perform.

[Captioned is Loaves and Fishes Community Kitchen in Brattleboro]

Otherwise what do you personally find yourself useful in contributing that is now accepted and included by a social body?

Read More VERMONT DIARY >>>

Real Vermont Stories

Vermont “Maternity Homes”

by Beth Kanell

It began with a postcard. My husband Dave (who passed last April) collected them: colorful Vermont scenes, yes, but more importantly the black-and-white ones from the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s that showed actual scenes, especially in the Northeast Kingdom. There are hundreds of St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville images in his collection—but, proportional to both town size and events that seemed worth marketing as photographs, there are very few from, say, Granby or Victory in Essex County.

Or from Concord.

Dave plunged me into a new research project when he found a card labeled “Quimby Maternity Home, Concord, Vt.” His knowledge of postcard publishers and some quick investigation prompted him to added the information “1949–1953.”

As we, and then I, probed further, we found more than 50 documented births that took place, not just in the Quimby (also called Graves, for nurse Ardella “Nana” Graves — illustrated) Maternity home, but also in the Austin Maternity Home in the same small town (this one, run by Leah Virginia Austin). And both were clearly “supervised” by the local doctor, Frederick Russell Dickson, M.D.

“Maternity homes” in the rest of America seem to have often been places for unwed mothers to give birth and send their babies out for adoption. Dave and I found a single request from an adoptee born in 1946 at a Concord maternity home for clues to his parentage. But that turned out to be the exception. Online access led us to birth certificates of many babies simply born in these more supportive, medically encouraged “homes.” Mothers could arrive a day early, stay a few days afterward, have a break from parenting and get a good start with the new arrival.

But such maternity homes were not well documented. In the case of the ones in Concord, Dr. Dickson worked under contract for the local paper mill, which provided him space for a “dispensary,” and cared for many more illnesses, injuries, and preventive cases than the babies being born—and no records from the two maternity homes have been located.

So Dave and I went to local Facebook “pages” and “groups,” where residents current and past share their memories. To our astonishment, we discovered another maternity home that took patients at the same time period, the early 1900s, and it was about 20 miles from Concord, in Lyndonville, Vermont.

<Extract>

Read More of this article >>>

How I Write

Vincent Panella

THE CHANNEL

These journal entries center on a fragment written forty-odd years ago. I recently found the pages typed on carbon paper, yet through all those years I mulled over the story and its possibilities – a confined setting, clear situation, very few characters, maybe a one-act, maybe a short story, but still no desire to get back in. This summer I re-entered the typescript and came up with a story line that might work: 

A young man named Larry heads for Hollywood with a copy of his first novel soon to be published. The premise of the novel is a young man’s affair with his father’s lover. Larry’s car breaks down in the Mojave just outside of Barstow. He ends up in a radiator shop and there he meets a Samaritan type called Fenwick, also a writer, and they talk about his novel, what he invented, what he remembered – what was ‘true to life - and that blurry line between art and lived experience.

The dated entries here are edited for clarity. The original fragment was page after page about his car breaking down on a long hill.....almost nothing about substance, character, motivation, etc. Forty years ago – like now – I’m still learning. It’s working title was Barstow, but gradually a theme emerged, and the title Hill of Dreams helped me shape it. The entries span two months of this year but I must have worked on the story twice as long as that. In most cases the journal entries prompt the writing of actual text, which is done on screen, on paper, and sometimes with an Olivetti.

 7/21/19 - Took a look at what I did to Barstow - still on the opening, how I chopped it to s - - -. Now all the car details are almost gone – the old V-8 burning oil, the crankcase ventilation valve, oil gauge idiot light, the retread tires because the character has so little money.

 7/22 -  Woke up thinking Bartow was f----- -  that the whole gambit is a cliche - Larry writes a novel based on life, sort of – the premise being that his main character has an affair with his father’s lover. Larry has rendered a real life experience into a novel – his novel is within this story. The story is that that Larry’s heading for Cali with a novel in which the central action is drawn from his life and a threat to his family’s privacy. And his car breaks down on the long hill outside of town.

 – and where a movie producer is interested in the novel as Larry imagines famous actors playing his family members and what their reaction might be.

 Then his car breaks down on the Hill of Dreams. Fenwick (name borrowed from a Boll story) takes him to a hotel while he waits for a new radiator. They have some yet to be written convo about his situation, what he's written about his father etc. In the end Larry drives off into the sunset, back up the hill of dreams. End of story.

 Scene: "I call it the Hill of Dreams," Fenwick said, They were sitting in the hotel lobby at a small bar and tables with a view of a garden and a raft of Eucalyptus trees.

Fenwick points out the similarity between Larry and the Okies generations back -  heading for a new life out west, beaten by the hill, or not beaten....Fenwick there to pick up the pieces.

Larry felt a little buzz from the whiskey, a comfortable feeling, the big room with its open windows along the wall was cool and comfortable without any air conditioning as was his room where he'd slept well and long, realizing that the past four nights he'd been sleeping in the back seat of the Pontiac.

<Extract>

Read More of this article >>>

SCREENplay

Wildlife

Lawrence Klepp

Wildlife, the directorial debut of the actor Paul Dano, came and went quietly early this year, but it’s now available on streaming platforms, and it’s worth pursuing if you have a chance. In a year of outstanding female performers—Glenn Close, Olivia Colman, Viola Davis, Rachel Weisz, among others—the riveting work by Carey Mulligan in this film was largely overlooked. Based on a Richard Ford novel, the movie is set in a small town in Montana in 1960. The town, like many small Western towns, has a bleak, windswept, middle-of-nowhere ambience, but there’s a soaring mountain backdrop that is impressive in itself and lends the film a pathos of distance, a sense that life, or happiness, may be just over the horizon.

Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal play Jeanette and Jerry Brinson, a working-class couple in their mid-30s with a 14-year-old son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould). The family is barely making it financially but seems united and happy. But then Jerry gets fired from his job at a country club, having joined several members, at their invitation, for an off-hours game of golf and a drink afterward, thus violating club protocols. Jeanette, always smiling, always encouraging, is at first optimistic. She’s sure Jerry will quickly find another job. And, if necessary, she could work part-time, and they might move to a cheaper house, one even smaller and more nondescript than the one they’re renting.

<extract> Read More SCREENplay

Environment there and here

Special Environmental report by Phil Innes — Column George Harvey

In Iceland:

¶ Katrin Jakobsdottir, the 41-year-old chairwoman of the Left-Green Movement, has been elected Prime Minister of Iceland. One of the most well-liked politicians in Iceland, Katrín, a former education minister and avowed environmentalist, has pledged to set Iceland on the path to carbon neutrality by 2040. As Iceland’s fourth prime minister in only two years, Katrín will take office at a time when national politics have been tainted by public distrust and scandal. A democratic socialist, Katrín is viewed as a bridge-building leader that may lead the country towards positive, incremental change. “She is the party leader who can best unite voters from the left and right,” said Eva H. Onnudottir, a political scientist at the University of Iceland, according to the New York Times. “Because this coalition includes parties from the left to the right, their work will be more about managing the system instead of making ‘revolutionary’ changes.”

In an era when climate change is making it necessary for countries around the world to implement sustainable energy solutions, Iceland presents a unique situation. ... The story of Iceland's transition from fossil fuels may serve as an inspiration to other countries seeking to increase their share of renewable energy.

About 85% of all houses in Iceland are heated with geothermal energy. ... Renewable energy provided almost 100% of electricity production, with about 73% coming from hydropower and 27% from geothermal power.

In the USA:

¶ President Trump's first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, resigned effective July 6, 2018, amid a series of scandals. Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, started serving as acting administrator on July 9, 2018. Wheeler was confirmed as EPA Administrator on February 28, 2019.

The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment. EPA's purpose is to ensure that: ... the United States plays a leadership role in working with other nations to protect the global environment.

The EPA has 14,172 employees, and has a budget of $8,200,000,000.

<extract> Read More World & US Energy News

From The Archive

Evolution of democracy from economy to ecology

Editorial Essay

...Not too long ago these [energy] subjects were spoken of as ‘alternatives’, but in the chaotic energy scene of today they are currently only an alternative to chaos itself. One may scoff at specific proposed solutions, but the main problems can no longer be denied.

Elsewhere, Brattleboro as an influential hub to an extensive bio-region, a region without a name, is taking steps to implement a topic suggested by Wendell Berry in an essay he had published at Orion Press, Winter 2001. He titled the central essay The Idea of a Local Economy. This too, said Berry, is not an ‘alternative’ to anything but disempowerment. ‘Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.’

Indeed, I remember William Irwin Thompson, founder of the Lindisfarne Foundation, New York City, saying much the same in 1982 — that the evolution of democracy will occur when we begin to shift from economy to ecology, thereby an intelligence of bio-regions provides the basis for action within the region, and Berry’s Local Economy is also the base of an enhanced local polity.

Certainly just being ‘aware’ of the difficulties in the world is altogether too passive and we might also consider a term coined by Buckminster Fuller in terms of the right way to harness our technology and economy; Imagineering.

<extract> From The Archive

Blurb Writers At The Edge

Not everyday a Vermont Views columnist has a book published. Here is Daybook 1 by Toni Ortner with reviews by Arlene Distler, Tim Mayo and Phil Innes

This would be Steinbeck if he hadn’t fooled around in other people’s kitchens. This is a full-score Cohen with two more notes, not reaching anywhere, but ever taking in. The words come humming out of the dark to shatter crystalline on the floor as sharp edged duo-tone fridge magnets familiar and mysterious as if designed by Paul Klee — not made in China or the Old Country, made in the Wild East of New York is more like it. There are hiding demons in the text waiting to pierce you, and there are non-resident angels flirting with sin.

—Phil Innes, Vermont Views Magazine

Read more of this and other letters to Vermont Views >>>

GALLERY ONE

A photographic essay on Devon and Cornwall

Anne Lenten, Ed.

A series of photographs about ‘another place’ collected by the remarkable photographer Anne Lenten — Notes by Phil Innes

#6 Mining conditions haven’t changed much in 100 years

See more photos in this article Gallery One >>>

GUEST ARTCLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #15

Some sentences from Cuba

Mac Gander

It is dawn in La Habana and I am listening to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music” as my wife Shanta sleeps in the next room and I mark the end of our third week here. One week to go. Travel is exhausting. There is no moment in which one does not wish to be awake.

I am thinking of the opening trope in Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro,” where he invokes Marley as one of the three great gods still left in the Florida Keys after a nuclear holocaust, a book that ends with a war-ship returning to those shores after a 90-year quarantine, from Cuba, a grey ship that is taller than the sky.

GUEST ARTICLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #12

What lies beneath: Our stories our ghosts

Shanta Lee Gander

Who came first?  Europa or Europe?  With some research, I could get an answer, but the story of a girl who keeps dreaming about two continents fighting over her and who meets her fate and immortality with a God turned beautiful bull is an old one

ARCHIVE

Hundreds of Articles

Recently added:

Maclean and Shanta Lee Gander : 15 Letters from Cuba

ARTICLES     December — May

Toni Ortner Change of Season  Old Lady Blog

Susan Cruikshank Straitjacket Emotions Write Walk

Anneli Karniala APRIL 26, 2021 – 35 YEARS AFTER CHERNOBYL Finnish Fandango

Laura Stevenson A Cautionary Horror Tale, Margot Harrison, Vermont Authors Reviewed

Lloyd Graf Killdeer Urban Naturalist

Elizabeth Hill Sending Love To Findhorn- A Tribute to The Community Centerand The Main Sanctuary Love In Action

Nicola Metcalf Bath Water’s Edge

Charles Monette Becoming Calm in the morning Meanderings

Steve Minkin What we can learn from moths Tsunami & Blossoms

Vincent Panella Splice The First Glass

Jeri Rose The morass mind Archetypal Hippie Speaks

Julia Ferrari UNDER a GREY SKY Monkey’s Cloak

Julia Ferrari Covid 19, Civil Unrest and the Deeper Healing of the Planet in between

Offie Wortham "Automated Lottery" Open Mind

Steve Minkin A Golden Age of the Written Word – Brattleboro 1995-2004 Write On!

Nanci Bern Candles and Covid An A-Musing Life

Rob Mitchell I Got Covid Selected Letters

Linda Rubinstein A Graphic Journal Slide Show Pandemic Journal

Vermont Diary What about your contribution?

Beth Kanell Vermont “Maternity Homes” Real Vermont Stories

Vincent Panella 2019 Publisher Challenge Essays How I Write

Lawrence Klepp Wildlife SCREENplay

George Harvey Environment there and here, Special Report by Phil Innes World & US Energy News

From The Archive Evolution of democracy from economy to ecology

Anneli Karniala Feature Article Scandinavian Christmas Dishes FOODISH

Anne Lenten #5 You can’t have a pirate ship without pirates Gallery One Photographic Feature Series

Mac & Shanta Lee Gander 15 Letters from Cuba

Photo of the Day A variety of topics This Page

Passages Quotations by ... Home Page Regular Feature

#3•Jig and Drabble• Dairy Home Companion

ARCHIVE Hundreds of Articles

For PERMISSIONS to reprint some or all of any article write to the publisher vtviewsinnes@gmail.com

Otherwise all work is © All rights reserved by Vermont Views Magazine, the writer, or both.