I write this letter to you to express my dismay and frustration. I have had the absolute pleasure to know Al Barber I would estimate 45 years that I…
Category: Opinion
Our Vermont Community Schools: A Better Way?
February 22, 2021 Many Vermont towns are torn between the financial imperative to consolidate their shrinking student populations into larger nearby educational facilities and their deep desire to retain the…
Building a regional food supply system out of the pandemic
Opportunities lurk in every downturn. To recover and move forward, we must do more than scramble back to the past, we must ferret out and explore better and more secure ways to live and thrive.
Barn Talk
A curious offhand comment I heard upon first visiting Hinesburg in 1976 alluded to something called “barn talk,” a time that coincides with the first meeting of my future father-in-law, Howard H. Russell, the patriarchal namesake of the Russell Family Farm.
Brave new world
The pandemic we’re muddling through confronts each of us both with life-threatening risk and prospective opportunities for renewal.
The bell of Our Lady
One Sunday at the conclusion of the 8 o’clock service at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Charlotte, bright sun flooded the east-facing entrance of the church through the open double doors.
Death by cop
The last person Vermont executed
was Donald Demag on December
8, 1954. Demag committed two
robberies and killed two people while
doing so.
Gull Talk
If old enough, the perfunctory annual statement received from the
Social Security Administration dutifully lists one’s work history, dates and employers, from the point one needed to have “working papers.”
End of the consumer economy
At the end of World War II, the United States began to build an economy based on consumerism.
Some annual town reports are keepers
The annual town report that hit
mailboxes in mid-February is a bellwether of better things to come.