“It’s been raining a lot, so much so that Vermont’s emerald green now rivals Ireland; at least, that. My friends are on tour there, while I have been weeding in the mud, delicately removing small sprouts from a rich, earthly loam. I might be satisfied with my lot, were it not for the fact that some Celtic gentleman appeared in my dreams this week, reminding me how much more of life I could be living. Not in word, but likely in stance, as his bemused affection & longish, messy hair in a pony tail spoke of mischief. Well, honestly, even a slice of that good life is better than none. We do get up to a few hijinks, here in the gardens of New England, and on the roads between. With a truck load of wood chips, and a back seat folded up to accommodate chokeberry bushes, fragile delphinium & the oddly transfixing geum perennial, there is hardly room for a human passenger. But somehow, one fits - lunch bag, and all. We ride out along the ambling Ripton Road, passing the perpetual roadside spring “Lucky Seven”, as well as goats in a pen, one of Robert Frost’s rustic homesteads, and a shuttered hotel, advertising music from 3-5 pm on the weekends. We’ve vowed to come back so many times, fun to imagine ourselves sipping drinks in downtown Hancock, VT population 359, with cleaner clothes on. Espousing that every day is a good day for a detour, I can still enjoy and adhere to my work ethic, M-F. My kind of structure, is self created and creative. I cannot wait to get to work, and dig into something I love. But with shovels, and a not insignificant amount of yardage to unload within the hour, why not stop for a coffee first? The best general store is yet to come, in Barnard. I feel so many things, pulling into my usual parking spot. It would not be uncommon to bump into a character here, or long for one, now deceased. The ghosts of old Elliot, Rooster Records, Sinclair Lewis and Sigafoos, among many others, still gather and glimmer in the ripples of Silver Lake, as reliable as the weather. My own convos, and adventures with the infamous Brown Trout, seem to belong here, although we’ve traveled far & wide, but always seem to end up, curbside to the store’s cement north porch and bulletin board. Not far from here, we’ve searched for hidden cartels, exchanged addresses with thru hikers on the Appalachian trail, skied into remote cabins for gourmet dinners, uncovered lost Jeep trails & cemeteries, dipped into secret baptismal pools, and drunk mead from paper cups, to the chicken scratch of out-of-tune fiddles and banjos, in fields and forests that seem to radiate out from the store. And at the top of it all, glorious and hard, sweaty and transcendent, I count the many days, months and years, of spring, summer and fall, I’ve spent building and rebuilding gardens in this town. I am so grateful. Anyway, it’s all in a day’s work. What you decide to do, is what you end up doing.”
