my green vermont

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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

Spammers I Have Known

For a blog as tiny as this one, I sure have a dedicated following among spammers. Every day I spend time deleting spam that I might otherwise spend fretting about

Read More »

How It Began

In her first letter, my mother addresses him formally, as Vosté. He is, after all, her violin teacher from Barcelona. He has invited her and her family to a concert

Read More »

Bad News for Vegetarians

Blame it on my somewhat monastic lifestyle, but I tend to get involved in the lives and deaths of the creatures in my house, such as the tiny ants whose

Read More »

The Apron

In 1959, my parents and I went back to Spain for the summer. This was a big deal. Since leaving Barcelona, we had spent three years in the wilds of

Read More »

Latinx—A Rant

I never thought I would agree with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly Trump’s press secretary and now governor of Arkansas, on anything. But when she banned the word Latinx from the

Read More »

Dryer Balls

One, two, three, four…where is #5? It’s laundry day, and I’m counting dryer balls, those woolen, felted spheres that are supposed to shorten the time it takes for clothes to

Read More »

Fighting Pollyanna

As the first pimples of puberty appeared on my face, my moods took a downward turn. While all around me my classmates were morphing into butterflies, I was stuck in

Read More »

Spring Fling

Maybe it was the light, which by mid-February in these northern latitudes really starts to put in an appearance, but last week I had a sudden spurt of energy that

Read More »

My Green Vermont
Latest Posts

Spammers I Have Known

For a blog as tiny as this one, I sure have a dedicated following among spammers. Every day I spend time deleting spam that I might otherwise spend fretting about

Read More »

How It Began

In her first letter, my mother addresses him formally, as Vosté. He is, after all, her violin teacher from Barcelona. He has invited her and her family to a concert

Read More »

Bad News for Vegetarians

Blame it on my somewhat monastic lifestyle, but I tend to get involved in the lives and deaths of the creatures in my house, such as the tiny ants whose

Read More »

The Apron

In 1959, my parents and I went back to Spain for the summer. This was a big deal. Since leaving Barcelona, we had spent three years in the wilds of

Read More »

Latinx—A Rant

I never thought I would agree with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, formerly Trump’s press secretary and now governor of Arkansas, on anything. But when she banned the word Latinx from the

Read More »

Dryer Balls

One, two, three, four…where is #5? It’s laundry day, and I’m counting dryer balls, those woolen, felted spheres that are supposed to shorten the time it takes for clothes to

Read More »

Fighting Pollyanna

As the first pimples of puberty appeared on my face, my moods took a downward turn. While all around me my classmates were morphing into butterflies, I was stuck in

Read More »

Spring Fling

Maybe it was the light, which by mid-February in these northern latitudes really starts to put in an appearance, but last week I had a sudden spurt of energy that

Read More »