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“On the Rocks” French Mountain Cottage
Montgomery
Enosburg Falls
Newport
Welcome to The Northeast Kindgom of Vermont. Verdant rolling hills, farm after farm, sweet small towns with cow splat contests, and some of the nicest people around. They make hard cider and smoke meat and fish with corn cobbs. They have sugar shacks in dense maple forests and covered bridges spanning trout-filled rivers. Three thousand miles away, yet it feels like home.
This post is dedicated to Rupert. A very Good Man.
It started with a frog near a rented cottage in the Vermont countryside, rather, a chorus of of frogs. The house had a pond filled with them. They greeted us in the darkness when we arrived, loose and jangly like guitar strings, and would croak and sing at all hours, perched on lilly pads and hidden among reeds and grass. They hopped to safety when we got too close, save this single one, the tiniest we saw, eyes dazzling gold coins, and entirely mute, despite our protestations.
We made friends with Herman the Moss Man while eating tiny blackberries gleaned from patches nestled in forested hedgerows, talking about nothing at all.
We swam in Lake Mephremagog and gathered with new “old” friends on an anchored platform, bouncing and bobbing, voices booming and laughing, bodies stretching and baking in the afternoon sun.
We met a bearded captain, bronzed and shirtless, with a beautiful boat made from wood felled in his own forest. His hands were meant for sailing.
We cruised the lake in a fast boat, thrumming and warm with happiness.
We heard loons and watched the sunset.
We ate simple food and roasted marshmallows over a blazing fire, bringing out the child in all of us.
We sipped cool drinks and told stories and reminisced.
And with all my soul, I felt the specialness, the gratitude, the awe, of knowing this was one of the best days of my life.
Sooo…
This is Denver, for the time being.
This coming Monday, it will be fourteen years since we parted, not a single regret.
Left the golden sun and scorching summers.
Left bone rattling thunderstorms and white-hot lightning in the black of night.
Left snow of every stripe.
Left ice skate on the apartment pavement all winter-long.
Left static electric shocks and my hair standing on end.
Left lapis, azure, cerulean, sapphire, and plain blue skies.
Left behind
but not lost.
A road map etched on my heart.
Right to everything
Left to everyone
I’ve ever loved
THERE.
Forever Mine.
.
Colleen Sohn
…
p.s. A link to info about the Huichol VW. Very cool…
Mt. Saint Helens
Mt. Rainier & Mt. Adams
I pick the prettiest part of the sky, and I melt into the wind and then into the air, till I’m just soul on a sunbeam.
Richard Bach
Tags: Quoting
Day Two of my Denver related posts, in honor of my Mama’s birthday! Happy, happy!
We’re starting at home on the giant rocks of my youth. The sight of many a photograph, much mischief, laughter, and games, even a kiss or two!
Close Encounters-type clouds greeted us in Boulder.
The Flatirons
and Chatauqua Park in all their splendor.
We’ll eat, drink, and be merry.
I’ll take a photo on the sly,
enjoy the light, and surprise my parents by ordering a side of green beans. The girl who flushed them down the toilet after sneaking them into her napkin, and after being discovered would thereafter cut them into small pieces and swallow like pills, has grown UP.
Boulder and the Pearl Street Mall, despite being far, far older than I,
remain quite the same. Beautiful brick facades,
the twice daily in their accuracy old clocks,
and eager buskers are just as I remember,
that sense of place that resonates.
Something to practice.
When I was little, and the trees in our yard were not so big, I loved gazing at the “castle” gleaming in the morning light from my bedroom window. When I see it now, I feel eight-years-old and giddy all over again. “The castle!”
Looking back to Boulder, the sky’s bark worse than its bite, at least that day.
Thomson Elementary – you were my school back when the doors were orange. I liked them better that way, more like the tigers we were.
Daddy takes me for a ride in his retirement present and drives like a teenager.
This is where I ran around barefoot, brown as a berry, and eager as the truth, from 1976 until 1993. My first home.
