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
Milestone
Google Blogger, which keeps track of such things, tells me that as of last week I have published one thousand posts on My Green Vermont. Other than breathing and sleeping
The Face of Love
I don’t have the words yet to explain why what I want is so important, so I open my mouth wide and yell, and stamp my feet. “Olé, olé!” my
The Miracle
“And please, God, send me a little brother or sister”: this was the coda that, as a child, I appended to my nightly prayers for years, with no luck. I
Bisou at Seventy
My little red Cavalier, Bisou, just turned seventy in dog years, which makes her almost my age. How did she get there so fast? Every day I scan her for
Boys in my Class
For all my writing about the drama of starting high school without knowing English, you’d think that there would be some trace of that in the journal that I kept
My Mother and the Can of Crisco
During our years in Quito, my mother learned to shop in the open-air markets where Indian women, wearing long braids and black fedoras, layers of petticoats, and, usually, a baby
The Lipstick Wars
In the late 1950s, in my Catholic school in Birmingham, Alabama, girls wore their hair short, their skirts long and tight, and their lips coated with dark red lipstick. I
Words, Words, Words
Remember “surreal”? People used to say it all the time, mostly in situations that had nothing to do with limp watches or dreamlike events. “The service here is so slow,
My Green Vermont
Latest Posts
Milestone
Google Blogger, which keeps track of such things, tells me that as of last week I have published one thousand posts on My Green Vermont. Other than breathing and sleeping
The Face of Love
I don’t have the words yet to explain why what I want is so important, so I open my mouth wide and yell, and stamp my feet. “Olé, olé!” my
The Miracle
“And please, God, send me a little brother or sister”: this was the coda that, as a child, I appended to my nightly prayers for years, with no luck. I
Bisou at Seventy
My little red Cavalier, Bisou, just turned seventy in dog years, which makes her almost my age. How did she get there so fast? Every day I scan her for
Boys in my Class
For all my writing about the drama of starting high school without knowing English, you’d think that there would be some trace of that in the journal that I kept
My Mother and the Can of Crisco
During our years in Quito, my mother learned to shop in the open-air markets where Indian women, wearing long braids and black fedoras, layers of petticoats, and, usually, a baby
The Lipstick Wars
In the late 1950s, in my Catholic school in Birmingham, Alabama, girls wore their hair short, their skirts long and tight, and their lips coated with dark red lipstick. I
Words, Words, Words
Remember “surreal”? People used to say it all the time, mostly in situations that had nothing to do with limp watches or dreamlike events. “The service here is so slow,