There is something special about the back roads of Vermont in early spring. On this particular day, I was heading home from work, ahead of my husband, when I came up to one of my favorite places. This place is the sheep farm owned by Dave, our good friend and veterinarian to our Collie then. […]

The neighbors’ German Shepherd is barking. I can hear it clearly throughout the house. I have to counsel myself to just accept what is. They do bring him (her?) in after a while; it’s not constant. So I tell myself, and get busy, and pretty soon it stops barking (or I stop being aware of […]

Years from now, one topic of conversation will be: “What did you do during COVID?” The answers will be as diverse as the people – read all of my bucket list books, learned a musical instrument, played mahjong online with older family members. These are all laudable, but my wife and I became buckthorn busters. […]

As a child of the inner city, I was seduced by three manifestations of “rural” and what that meant: yellow school buses, “RFD” on mailboxes and a fifth-grade field trip to Cook’s Canyon, a wildlife sanctuary in Barre, Massachusetts. City buses were ubiquitous in Worcester, a part of the urban landscape as they plied their […]

As a young child living in Portland in the 1960s, I would be beyond excited when my parents would plan a summer weekend excursion with my brother and me to our great-aunt and great-uncle’s rural farm in Madison. After a nearly two-hour drive, we would finally pull up to the circular, dirt driveway of Uncle […]