Spring

By Geoffrey Norman

In the mid-part of April around here, you begin thinking about yard work and start laying in the necessities.   Once the last scraps of snow have melted away, things happen fast and you can quickly fall way behind the curve.  And the part of the whole equation that requires the greater part of your time and attention is, of course, the least interesting.  That would be the grass.

Everything about a yard is more beguiling than the grass, which doesn’t do anything but grow.  And there are no guarantees on that. 

You have to coax it and baby it and feed it special formulas.

But first you have to rake it.  

Because the grass has been buried under snow and scoured by sheets of ice, it is brown and matted and to bring it back to life, you must scratch it briskly with a metal lawn rake.   This removes the old dead grass and, evidently, invigorates the surviving roots and blades.  It is also tedious work that consumes time you could otherwise spend on the perennial beds or the vegetable garden or the golf course where there is an actual point to grass.

All grass, however, must be attended to.  It is needy, that way. » read more

By Paul Fersen

Twenty years ago I wrote about building my house. When I built it, I assumed it would be the last house I would ever live in, but things change, lives take directions we never imagined and things we consider indelible, suddenly become untenable. What we needed then seems a bit much now. It’s time to build a new one.

Am I sad about this? Yeah, there’s a part of me that looks around at the familiar timbers that I put into place, the pegs I drove in, the walls I painted. I can remember every step of the process down to the most minute detail, simply because I did it myself with a little help from my friends. But is it devastating? No. In fact, I’m pretty excited about it, because this gives me the opportunity to do it all over again, albeit on a smaller scale. Building this house myself is the best time I ever had with tools and clothes on. Mimi and I designed it together, built it together, and raised our children here. Looking back on our life together it was, aside from farming, the most fun we ever had, because we were totally focused on our home. Today we’re focused on everything but our home, just trying to survive and somewhere we seem to have lost the reason for moving to Vermont. We’re tired of waving at each other on the road. » read more

By Kristin Mcdonald

Photography By Hubert Schriebl
 
The Taft-Pickering Wedding

Their story began on a basketball court. Both were students at Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center, both on the college’s teams, so they saw each other often. Eventually they began playing pick-up together and soon became inseparable. After three years of steady dating, Chris Taft of Springfield asked Amanda Pickering of Arlington to marry him. First getting her father, Fred’s, permission, Chris took her for a walk down a back road in the hollow near Amanda’s family farm. She said yes, and to commemorate their pledge they carved each other’s initials into a large sycamore tree that had split from the original trunk into two separate trees—CCT on one side, AJP on the other. Chris noted the significance: the two trees were joined but separate, and they had grown old together, his plan for the two of them.

But we are jumping ahead. First, they had a wedding to plan. » read more

By Geoffrey Norman

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

You probably can’t find an ox-yoke at the new Williams store. Times do change. But in the essentials, H.N. Williams remains the same.

There was a distinct sense of trepidation and, even, awe about my first visit to the H. N. Williams Department Store (Est. 1840) in Dorset, Vermont, where I had recently moved from a small island in the North Atlantic called Manhattan. It was more a rite of passage or an initiation or something than it was an ordinary shopping trip. Flatlanders such as I didn’t simply waltz into the venerable Williams and just buy something like it was nothing out of the ordinary. No more than a visiting Yank would just drop in on a Saville Row tailor while in London and say, “Howdy. Like to try on a couple of your suits.” » read more

By Kathleen James

Photgraphy By Hubert Schriebl

In East Dorset, the childhood home of AA founder Bill Wilson is a meetinghouse for recovering alcoholics from around the world.

Aldous Huxley called Bill Wilson the greatest social architect of the 20th century. Time magazine named him one of the century’s 100 most important people—a list that includes Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Bill Gates and Albert Einstein. The organization he co-founded in 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous, has reached millions of men and women who struggle with addiction. And today, an estimated two million people worldwide are successfully following Wilson’s example and staying sober one day at a time. » read more

By Ellen Ogden

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

More than just a place to plant lettuce and herbs, a kitchen garden can be a thing of beauty and a work of art

When I planted my first kitchen garden in 1980, I marked the perimeters with four sticks and a ball of twine. Borrowing a sharp edged spade, I removed the layer of turf, double-dug the remaining soil to create a loose pile, and then supplemented with a few shovel fulls of compost. I was fresh out of art school, so instead of making art on a canvas, I began to think of myself as a food artist; building color in the garden with a collage of lettuces blended with dabs of red orach, fronds of emerald green chervil and rosettes of claytonia that elevated the garden—as well as a simple bowl of salad—into a work of art. 

By Betsy Parks

Photography By Hubert Schriebl

Rails, tabletops, boxes and lots of high mountain air for dare devils in all of us. 

Not so long ago, skiing and snowboarding was all about getting from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Sometimes a bump became a jump, or a few adventure seekers took it to the rough trail edges and even sometimes off into the woods. But for the most part we all kept it on the ground. Then came freestyle skiing and the first snowboarding halfpipes, both pushing the boundaries of alpine sports from just going fast and getting to the bottom into exploring midair. These days, Stratton and Bromley area terrain parks are offering more and more of those high-flying experiences for skiers and riders of all abilities. » read more

It sometimes seems like winter is in no hurry to leave and that it might just decide to stick around until May or even Memorial Day. This is especially true on the little knob where I live. It is planted in pine trees that are now 60 or 70 years old. They are tall and tightly spaced, so they block out a lot of sun. We still have snow on the yard when some of my friends are out working in their perennial beds. » read more