Items

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  2020-05-22

  Can You Gather With God Over Zoom?

  This article describes how several Quaker meetings (including the one my family attends), which involve mostly silent, communal contemplation, have altered their practices for social distancing.
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  2020-06-06

  I See You

  A silent vigil held in Vergennes, Vermont to protest police brutality after the killing of George Floyd and others. Participants were asked to wear masks and remain six feet apart.
• 2020-03-20

  By the time you read this, it will already be obsolete

  They say in Vermont, if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes for it to change. I haven’t found it true of clouds or rain, but the news is on an hourly refresh: constantly changing, though never for the better. The world’s gone to dog time. Days have telescoped to weeks. Last week feels like a different era entirely, when kids went to school, businesses stayed open, you could grab lunch in town or take the cat to the vet. After days of pouring over graphs, I could redraw contagion curves from memory, but it all seems strangely theoretical. The number of reported cases in Vermont is still less than a block in Wuhan or Milan. And it’s never that busy here, so the towns look pretty much normal. Nationally and worldwide, the deaths are still lower than the flu, lower than heart disease, lower than car accidents, and yet the trajectories explode like a flushed grouse. While these fears, statistics, and calculations swoop through my brain, the real birds have returned: lines of geese, honking encouragement as they struggle against the wind; gangs of grackles, blackbirds and starlings descending on our feeders and glistening in the cloudy half-light. We should really bring our feeders in, as the warmth has awakened the bears. Last year the ground was frozen nearly until May. This year the snow vanished a few days before the pandemic arrived, winter evaporating as quickly as our former lives. My husband and kids, home all the time now, help me rake away last year’s leaves, uncovering bright shoots of daffodils, and yellow and purple crocuses already blooming. Soon the frogs will shout their odes to fertility from every pond, sending out an aural map of still water. Each time I go outside, my spirits lift, just a little, as non-human life goes on the way it always has, and the world tilts slowly toward warmth.
• 
  04/11/2020

  Toilet paper deals

  Toilet paper's gone from a somewhat banal certainty to a hot commodity - enough to turn heads on a advertisement and provide a little roadside humor. #VTsigns
• 
  03/26/2020

  Little Free Library

  In response to worries about shopping and access to food/paper goods, the Middlebury Little Free Library, which normally holds books, was switched over to a Little Free Pantry, where people could donate or pick up grocery staples.
• 
  2020-05-04

  Socially distanced dinosaur

  A life size T-Rex outside a metalwork studio in Rutland, Vermont is observing safe Covid-19 practices.