The Way I See It: In Praise of Spider Webs
The poet William Butler Yeats once wrote about a “centre that CANNOT hold,” and sometimes that is true for people, too. Thirty-five years ago, I was hospitalized for severe depression. When I…
The Way I See It: Vermont Granite Museum, Part 3: People and Relationships
Vermont Granite Museum Executive Director Scott McLaughlin may be getting paid to run a museum, but he’ll tell you his superpower is being an…
The Way I See It: What Has Mountains but No Trees, and Roads but No Cars?
Earlier this winter, while driving back from my sister and brother-in-law’s house in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, I got caught in an unexpected, localized…
The Way I See It: Vermont Granite Museum, Part 2: Work in Progress
In a particularly frigid mid-February, things look pretty deserted outside the Vermont Granite Museum, just west of downtown Barre. The museum is open to…
The Way I See It: So Comes Winter
Winter is the season of my discontent. Sometimes the light can be as sharp as a splinter, sometimes as luminous as an opal, but…
The Way I See It: Vermont Granite Museum, Part 1: History Carved in Stone
On a recent cool, cloudy morning on the Millstone Hill trails in Barre, a couple of dozen people gather around our history hike leader,…
The Way I See It: My Apprenticeship With Grief
I stood — looking out at a silver sea, waves swirling around my ankles — more than a year after my father’s passing. The ocean…
The Way I See It: From Fields to Road and Riversides, Vermont’s Native Landscape is Under Siege
For more than 40 years I have been conducting a field experiment in my Washington County home town of Calais. Literally, as in the…
The Way I See It: Huck, Jim, and James on the River
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935. Twain’s masterpiece, “The Adventures…
The Way I See It: Remembering My Dad
About a year ago, my mom suffered a minor stroke. She was planting flowers one moment, and in the next awoke on the pavement…
The Way I See It: In Praise of Government
On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump vowed to turn the water on. He was referring to a reservoir in northern California from…
The Way I See It: Confessions of An Aging Lawyer
Recently, I represented a secured creditor in a court case. The debtor, a farmer, needed to sell the cattle and farm equipment, my client’s…
The Way I See It: For Many Vermonters, a Sad Difficult Trip Lies Ahead
Imagine discovering you have signed up for a multi-year journey you never expected to take and didn’t want to go on. Then you look…
The Way I See It: Writers and Other Content Creators Bypass Publishers
Poetry is part of my daily life. I don’t write it, but I enjoy reading it and talking with poets about their work. Occasionally,…
The Way I See It: Ata mārie, Aotearoa
This morning I woke up early. I put on my running shoes and ran to the top of the hill behind my house, my…
The Way I See It: This Must Be The Place
There must be a candle in one of our local boutique shops called “Vermont Summer.” If there isn’t, it would be fun to create…
The Way I See It: Giving Away My Library
Books are magical. As readers, we wizards conjure up entire worlds from their pages. The contents are as limitless as human creativity: poetry about…
The Way I See It: All This Stuff is Driving Me Crazy
I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff lately. Your stuff. My stuff. Everyone’s stuff. Stuff we don’t want anymore. Stuff we don’t need.…
The Way I See It: Between Fire and Water
This past week I noticed my paddle board — practically untouched in its resting place against the house — gathering slugs. I was feeling…
The Way I See It: A Deluge for the Ages Needs a Flood of New Ideas
We are now a month into the grand reckoning delivered by Biblical-level rains that swept away life as we knew it in downtown Montpelier.…
The Way I See the Open Road
I recently traveled almost 200 miles across the far north of Scotland without a ticket or schedule. On the way, I learned about the…