To John in Tucson & many other friends ~
No need to ‘pretend’ you are family — you are !
No need to ‘pretend’ you are family — you are !
And we are eating fine and well and hardy, even on the road. Thanks for asking. We manage to find a salad bar or some nutrient grain muffins. Yesterday morning, gone at 5:30 A.M., we were no time in Manchester Village, and it was 30 degrees and nothing at all was moving in sleepy tourist town except we did notice small lights and movement in a tiny cafe off from a bookshop (closed), where two young women were busy as bees at work making delicious bakery goods and teas. It couldn't have been more ideal. I noticed through tiny windows on the sidewalk one of the women decorating bread slices with the gummiest pesto spread. She already had lunch on her mind. They had an apple crisp at a very reasonable asking price, and I asked! Susan and I knew this occasion would never be beaten during the day and the day was just raring to go. Sunlight rising over the frosted roofs, job traffic making a go, maintenance trucks and the small compacts now everywhere on rural roads. Hardly anyone drives an old clunker like we have at home until you get deeper into the mountains and the last of the farm lots, and that's where we were heading after the apple crisp and Susan's muffin. Love a place that has maple syrup for your tea. Love a town that offers all-day breakfast. Newburyport, Ma. on the coast line has such a dark windowed breakfast place. We were there the day before. We had come down from the White Mountains that morning to the sea, borrowing the traits of evolution, those mountains still in Susan's hair. My sister Sherry, dead by her own hand, the lost one, right with us, with her mementos we brought along.
This last day of the 4-day road marathon to bring my sister home to New England (from Florida) we went straight up the eastern flank of the Green Mountains. As a young woman she went to college in these mountains, until a musician arrived on campus with his band and stole her away. We’re talking the 1960s. If you look on the map the state forest roughly spreads from Whitingham in the south to Stowe in the north, along routes 7A and 100. That was our partner trail.There is heaven between Manchester and some miles south of Rutland. Rutland has gone to the dogs, but the downtown still has the rough edges of old Vermont meets new age and some ability to make things work properly. The outskirts, like all outskirts now, junked up for the madcap middle-class. The torque to America's rise or downfall. It takes only a few seconds to scram out of the cheesy outskirts, and a savannah returns of maple trees and lilacs everywhere, a bonus year. The apple trees can be boasted about, too. It'd be easy to take the slip and slide ride from Rutland over to Woodstock and eventually Hanover, but the traveler would be cheated out of real Vermont — that's when you turn onto rocky tar-pitted bump shattered route 100 and head north along the Greens...into Stockbridge, Rochester, the mellow grasslands tucked around one corner of the road and what's left of a farm site. Now a Ford dealer is nicely abridged into the barn. The four corners of farm-life is still intact, and that slows the very modest neighborhood traffic down to a full-stop, a nod or wave and maybe even a smile through the windshields. Open the vehicle windows, a cardinal is calling. The sunlight has just crashed its wave over all the pasture. Cows all gone. Cow people all gone. The dandelions are a week behind ours blown to white seed further south at home, so the yellow flower, so abundant, is lionized and terrific. I'll have to get out somewhere along the line and pick one for Susan.
We've got about an hour, tops, between one brash civilization focal point where all the traffic has been left behind, and where we'll pick it up again. In that hour will be small-town — modest libraries with sunken weird hours, unpainted buildings and worn steps leading up into a room with dim lighting. The only place you'll find old cars and old trucks. A child outdoors happy playing with a stick. Women in mens clothing. No latte cafes, no gourmet pizza, no new-age spin. But here's the slow walking thought moments of Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker, so slow it flashes. The new cars are speedy and compartmentalized, so the occupants blink and ask, "Was that a town?" Yes, it had a small village green, buildings old white with forest spruce trim, massive stone steps and foundations. Clothes on a rope clothesline. Maybe no cellphone reception — we left those self-yakkers miles back. The only reception worth your morning are the waterfalls surprising us and originating from a hemlock stand. The sign on a boardwalk access to one of the two falls proclaims one is about to cross upon a facility that is not maintained and one does so at one's own risk. Then I see how well it has been maintained with new spruce rails and bedding. Once upon a time the boardwalk wasn't even here and one traveled to one's desire by a footpath. I see the old footpath, and after enjoying the snow melt froth of the dominant waterfall, which reminds us somewhat of Nevada Falls in Yosemite, we climb over the hand rail and head up the footpath to the wilder and less showy cascade of water. The real mccoy. The one that makes you feel sexual and inspired and just your size. You seem to have reached this spot illegally. The water here is purer than the water inside yourself. Drink some. It's come from the bluest sky of long long ago.
late May 09
