Welcome to My Green Vermont
I was born in Barcelona, where I went to a school run by German nuns, studied solfeggio, and played the violin. When I was ten, my parents and I moved to Ecuador, where I had a number of exotic pets and strange adventures. Four years later, we landed in Birmingham, Alabama. None of us spoke English, and the strange adventures continued. (Many of these appear in My Green Vermont.)
Survived high school. Got B.A. in French and Biology, Ph.D. in Romance Languages (French and Spanish). Gave up the Church and the violin, got married, had two daughters, taught at a liberal arts college in Maryland. Also grew veggies, made bread, kept chickens, milked goats, and wrote for newspapers and magazines. I got bored with teaching, took up running, and went into higher ed administration. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and learned to live in a totally different way.
I started My Green Vermont when we moved to that state. For ten years I lived with my spouse, three dogs, twelve hens, two goats, and assorted passing wildlife in a house on a hill, surrounded by fields and woods. In 2014, we moved to a cottage in a continuing care residential community near Lake Champlain. Gave up livestock and vegetable gardening in favor of wild birds, honeybees, a little red dog, and a gray cat.
My Green Vermont is a fertile compost pile made up of stories about the weirdness of growing up in three countries and three languages; portraits of beloved animals, both wild and domestic; and reflections on aging, being kind to the earth, and staying as calm as possible. I hope you will visit often, and add your own stories and reactions.
My Green Vermont
Latest Posts
Guinea Hens
I don’t remember how we ended up with three guinea hens in our chicken coop. Someone must have given them to us, and being new to homesteading, I felt that
Bikini
The year before I married, my fiancé’s Alabama grandmother, whose name was Ruby Violet, decided that she was going to sew me a bathing suit. And not just any bathing
The Work of a Lifetime
In my recent apprenticeship as a beekeeper, I have learned one fact on which I’ve been dining out on for weeks. “How much honey does a single worker bee produce
Early Sounds
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that my earliest memories of my musician father have to do with sound. Here they are in chronological order, from early infancy to toddlerhood:
Green Pants
Among the pleasures I have given up lately, along with coffee, hot peppers, and red wine, (yes, this is going to be a whiny post), is shopping for clothes. It
Morning Pages
Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, says that every morning as soon as you wake up you should write three pages longhand, without stopping, paying no attention to grammar, spelling,
My Mother’s Lover
He first saw her on stage as she read stanzas of a poem by Federico García Lorca about the death of a bullfighter. Interspersed with the poetry were sections of
Save the Dandelions!
Their English name comes from Middle French dent de lion–lion’s tooth–because the ends of their petals look like they have been nibbled by a vegetarian lion. But in contemporary French
My Green Vermont
Latest Posts
Guinea Hens
I don’t remember how we ended up with three guinea hens in our chicken coop. Someone must have given them to us, and being new to homesteading, I felt that
Bikini
The year before I married, my fiancé’s Alabama grandmother, whose name was Ruby Violet, decided that she was going to sew me a bathing suit. And not just any bathing
The Work of a Lifetime
In my recent apprenticeship as a beekeeper, I have learned one fact on which I’ve been dining out on for weeks. “How much honey does a single worker bee produce
Early Sounds
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that my earliest memories of my musician father have to do with sound. Here they are in chronological order, from early infancy to toddlerhood:
Green Pants
Among the pleasures I have given up lately, along with coffee, hot peppers, and red wine, (yes, this is going to be a whiny post), is shopping for clothes. It
Morning Pages
Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, says that every morning as soon as you wake up you should write three pages longhand, without stopping, paying no attention to grammar, spelling,
My Mother’s Lover
He first saw her on stage as she read stanzas of a poem by Federico García Lorca about the death of a bullfighter. Interspersed with the poetry were sections of
Save the Dandelions!
Their English name comes from Middle French dent de lion–lion’s tooth–because the ends of their petals look like they have been nibbled by a vegetarian lion. But in contemporary French