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| Vermontese cats. |
Vermont is very... Vermont. It's just like Vermont. Knuckled fingers of denuded trees reach modestly up from a thick, spongy blanket of leaves that now- in mid-November- have lost most of their golds and reds, and have subsided into a sort of dull, tarnished copper. A thin net of crisp leaf veins spread gently over the dark business of winter rot. Stubbled fields, the sky a gentle, resigned blue and the air colder than it looks.
It all gives me a vague yen for red plaid blanket coats and the crunch and melt of maple candy.
On a back road, the sunlight hazy and fragrant through the drifting smoke of fall's first fires, laid in fields and fireplaces belonging to graciously sensible, plain victorian houses. the houses neatly shingled and painted and telling me that self-reliance and an attention to detail have a beauty all their own, and that dirt under the nails and the scrubbing thereof is a sweetly closed loop that deserves repetition.
The neat houses and the woods and hills beyond share a family resemblance, like a cousin you don't see often but who has your nose and your way of smiling.
On my backroads run yesterday I went past a house on a large patch of neatly-mown lawn with a flagpole in front- a rambling brown ranch house, weather-stripped, freshly painted and complacently waiting for winter. Hooked through its ankles and hanging points-down from an iron armature near the road was a beautifully gutted young buck, eyes still bright and looking from the back entirely whole, not a hair out of place. From the front he was an elegant hollow, a beautiful suit with clean lines and a shining striated absence where his guts used to live.
Someone respected that buck by killing it cleanly and gutting it cleanly and hanging it cleanly. Someone slit open its belly and plunged their hands down into its organs, pulled them out into the chill air of fall in long, steaming ropes, and held its heart in their hands.
I wish I could've seen it.
It all gives me a vague yen for red plaid blanket coats and the crunch and melt of maple candy.
On a back road, the sunlight hazy and fragrant through the drifting smoke of fall's first fires, laid in fields and fireplaces belonging to graciously sensible, plain victorian houses. the houses neatly shingled and painted and telling me that self-reliance and an attention to detail have a beauty all their own, and that dirt under the nails and the scrubbing thereof is a sweetly closed loop that deserves repetition.
The neat houses and the woods and hills beyond share a family resemblance, like a cousin you don't see often but who has your nose and your way of smiling.
On my backroads run yesterday I went past a house on a large patch of neatly-mown lawn with a flagpole in front- a rambling brown ranch house, weather-stripped, freshly painted and complacently waiting for winter. Hooked through its ankles and hanging points-down from an iron armature near the road was a beautifully gutted young buck, eyes still bright and looking from the back entirely whole, not a hair out of place. From the front he was an elegant hollow, a beautiful suit with clean lines and a shining striated absence where his guts used to live.
Someone respected that buck by killing it cleanly and gutting it cleanly and hanging it cleanly. Someone slit open its belly and plunged their hands down into its organs, pulled them out into the chill air of fall in long, steaming ropes, and held its heart in their hands.
I wish I could've seen it.
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