The Start of the Fall

A series of days when the sky is paintbox blue and the breeze is soft among the trees. I'm regaining some of my energy and can stay awake long enough to see the sky packed tight with stars and the harvest moon making moon-shadows across the grass.

Our mornings begin early: Maya's bus collects her just over a mile from our house at 6.50am and Iola's school starts at 7.30am. We wake before the darkness silvers into dawn and hurry through our breakfast, while the kittens weave around our ankles and the hens cluck about their yard. The dog, with the wisdom he has gained from no longer being a puppy, hides beneath the covers in the warmest bed he can find until we are ready to leave the house.

My mother is staying for the next few weeks and I'm seeing our area through her eyes. She's been driving to the village and back, braving all the Vermont trucks which meander along on the 'wrong' side of the road and slaloming between the potholes which mark the point where the road repairs began earlier in the year and then abruptly stopped when the State funding was cut. In the UK, I am sure, the road would be considered unsafe and either closed completely or signposted extensively to warn drivers to slow down or take a detour. Here, there are no warnings: only a subtle change in the color of the tarmac. One minute all is well, the next moment the car's suspension bucks and jolts. The grin on my mum's face makes me suspect she's rather enjoying the excitement of the Vermont roads.

She's also enjoying the amazing array of foods. We ate our way around Montpelier Farmers' Market on Saturday: kimchi and burritos, clay oven baked pizza slices and pan-fried heart, pickled everything and maple syrup creemees and apple cider. The farm stall between our house and Maya's school is banked high with squash, sweetcorn and this season's apples and many local homes have produce stands at the ends of their driveways. I'm sure we should be canning and pickling and filling the cellar with things to get us through the winter, but we're too busy eating a lot and smiling.

We're also walking a lot. This morning, after the girls were at school, we headed up into Underhill State Park. The park is open until the middle of October, but there was no-one there this morning except Linda, the warden. She was pleased to see us: it had been a long evening with no campers and only her dog for company.

We climbed up through the park and headed South along the CCC road, feeling particularly grateful to Ruth who has loaned my mum a pair of walking boots. This lower slope of Mount Mansfield is heavily wooded: the birch and beech trees slowly giving way to coniferous forest as the elevation increases. A couple of miles from the trailhead, a firebreak has been cut through the forest and the view is, to use the local parlance, awesome! My mum and I sat for a while, looking out all the way to Burlington and Lake Champlain and to the Adirondack Mountains beyond.

We would have stayed longer but we needed to get home: we needed to plan what we were going to eat for lunch!