Everyone has had the experience: the day is going along just fine until someone calls and says, "Where are you?" Turns out you have missed an appointment that was scheduled for ?Wednesday and that you faithfully wrote down in your book or entered in your Palm.
So you say, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I thought it was Thursday."
Being emotionally stuck in the wrong day is one thing. But how about finding yourself stuck in the wrong month? Or season? Or even the wrong year? It happens to me all the time and I don't think I'm crazy. Not yet, anyway.
So let me explain.
We started thinking about this issue of Stratton Magazine a little over a year ago. It is the way we do business. We began sending material to the printer weeks ago which means that we began receiving and editing manuscripts, creating layouts, and selecting photographs about three months ago. So, in an editorial sense, we were living in the fall, even though it was actually early summer and late spring.
It is a little disconcerting to be thinking about Vermont's spectacular fall foliage when you are looking out your window at trees that are not yet full green and a garden that is just beginning to take hold.
This is what is known in the trade as "lead-time," and it causes a certain mental dissonance. You find yourself trying hard to come up with ideas for skiing-related articles when, outside, it is eighty degrees and people are playing golf.
It seems like a long time since you were on skis so you try, in your imagination, to transport yourself back there. So I frequently find myself out in the garden-wearing shorts and down on my knees, doing battle with the weeds-imagining myself in neck warmer, gloves, and the other necessary items of warm clothing and riding a chair lift.
Weird.
And if I should come up with an idea that I think might work for the next winter issue ... well, it is already too late. If I rushed inside and called one of my writers and said, "Get your skis and get up to the mountain, I've got this great idea," it would certainly appear that I'd finally and conclusively snapped.
To get writers on seasonal stories, then, and to make sure that Hubert can schedule time to take his striking photographs, the team at the magazine has to be thinking a full year in advance. We live in the future present tense. Part of the time. But when we are closing an issue, we are living in the next season. If it is summer for you; it is fall for us. Except that it is also summer. But next summer, if you follow. And I'm sure you don't. I have a hard time, myself.
But that is not to say that the team here doesn't do a wonderful job of celebrating whatever season we are in. In your life-real time-it is fall which may be the best season of all in Vermont. And I'm already there. You see, it is late June as I write this.
A few of the goodies we offer up in this issue include a diatribe against those messy leaves that keep falling off the trees and yucking up Peggy Shinn's lawn. We also join the SVAC in celebrating one of our own local artists-Arthur Jones-who has steadfastly making beautiful art for 50 years now.
We take a fresh-pressed look at cider and one of the local establishments that makes it from local apples; and at a kids' karate program that's helping to mold strong bodies and minds with the Northshire junior set.
So enjoy what is sure to be a spectacular autumn. I know, you see, because I've already been there.
