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
The Nice Guy
Among farm animals, the male of the species is often problematic. In the days before artificial insemination, dairy farmers were often killed by their herd sires. Male goats stink to
Peasant Madonnas
In my native Catalonia, as in much of Europe, the countryside is dotted with shrines to local statues of the Virgin Mary. These are very old (Romanesque era), or copies
The Frugal Chicken
My grandmother—the one who lived on a farm, in Catalonia, a long, long time ago—used to raise chickens and rabbits sort of like you and I raise tomatoes and green
Dump Diving And Other Post-Modern Arts
Ed and I were sorting our recyclables at the dump on a frigid day recently, when I stumbled on two boxes of what looked, under a thick layer of greasy
Schedule Struggles
Made a momentous decision this morning: I put off clipping the dogs\’ nails until after my writing time. That was after chicken chores, of course, and making the dogs\’ breakfast,
January Feelings
When our kids were little, we used to have heroic Christmases. Grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces would begin arriving at our house in the Maryland countryside the week before
Call Me Casanova
Went to a lovely New Year\’s Eve party, fell in love with a dog. A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel (how romantic a name is that?), white with orange spots, tiny
The Snake, the Egg, and I
Back when I used to keep hens, gathering eggs was my favorite job. As the evening sun streamed through the coop’s dusty windows, my buff-colored, matronly layers would wander around
My Green Vermont
Latest Posts
The Nice Guy
Among farm animals, the male of the species is often problematic. In the days before artificial insemination, dairy farmers were often killed by their herd sires. Male goats stink to
Peasant Madonnas
In my native Catalonia, as in much of Europe, the countryside is dotted with shrines to local statues of the Virgin Mary. These are very old (Romanesque era), or copies
The Frugal Chicken
My grandmother—the one who lived on a farm, in Catalonia, a long, long time ago—used to raise chickens and rabbits sort of like you and I raise tomatoes and green
Dump Diving And Other Post-Modern Arts
Ed and I were sorting our recyclables at the dump on a frigid day recently, when I stumbled on two boxes of what looked, under a thick layer of greasy
Schedule Struggles
Made a momentous decision this morning: I put off clipping the dogs\’ nails until after my writing time. That was after chicken chores, of course, and making the dogs\’ breakfast,
January Feelings
When our kids were little, we used to have heroic Christmases. Grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces would begin arriving at our house in the Maryland countryside the week before
Call Me Casanova
Went to a lovely New Year\’s Eve party, fell in love with a dog. A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel (how romantic a name is that?), white with orange spots, tiny
The Snake, the Egg, and I
Back when I used to keep hens, gathering eggs was my favorite job. As the evening sun streamed through the coop’s dusty windows, my buff-colored, matronly layers would wander around