Cold

I've been wanting to write a blog about how it feels to live in Vermont in winter. I thought it would be easy to describe, but the words 'cold' and 'freezing' don't really do justice to what it feels like. Winter in Vermont isn't just cold, it's...

Cold enough to bring a priest to his knees

Several summers ago, we met an Irish priest who now lives in Ontario. He was on a houseboat, we were on a houseboat. He and his friend were very accomplished at navigating their boat, we were not. We followed them into a lock gate and I tried to copy the easy grace with which he wrapped his rope around the bollard. After I'd dropped the rope and we'd collided, we fell into conversation. He loved life in Ontario, he told us. There was nothing quite like a brightly shining sun in a vivid blue sky to make one feel God's benevolence and loving kindness. He particularly loved how the sun shone during winter and how that contrasted with his dreary memories of Irish winters. Sunny winter days made him feel glad to be alive.

Two lock gates later, our conversations had become more personal and he made a different confession. There had been a day during his first Ontario winter when he had nearly died. He'd left the house - no doubt eulogizing about the bright blue sky and bright yellow sun - and started to walk to the corner store. The store was only a few blocks from his house - no big deal, he'd thought. He was lucky that neighbors rescued him, although he couldn't remember that happening. He described his thoughts screeching to a halt inside his head, and said the next thing he knew was that he was lying on someone's sofa thanking God for saving his fingers, his toes, his nose.
'Always wrap up well,' he warned us as we said our goodbyes, 'And always wear a hat and scarf.'

Cold enough to make your eyeballs hurt

I understand the priest better now than I did when I first heard that story. I understand the temptation to slip outside without going through the palaver of finding your gloves, your hat, your scarf... I understand how easy it is to persuade yourself that it's not that cold because the sun is shining and the sky is blue. I know how the first step out of the door supports that illusion because you carry some of the warmth from the house with you.

It's on the second or third step that you begin to notice your chest burning from the cold. A few steps more and filaments of ice begin to form on your nasal hairs. It hurts to blink because your eyeballs are beginning to freeze.

Really.

When it's cold in Vermont, your eyeballs begin to freeze.

Cold enough to wreck your car

Not having money enough to build a garage (and having been foolish enough to move into a house without one) we bought a portable version. It arrived in a large cardboard box and looks a bit like a tent: a huge swathe of canvas, some guy ropes and some very long tent pegs. The instructions are straightforward and we didn't think it would be a big deal to put the thing up. We meant to do it in summer, but with one thing and another we didn't remember until it was November and then it was too late.

It's worth a quick digression here to explain what I mean by 'too late'. When we moved in, our neighbors had an old horse which had been in their family for nearly 30 years. The children and the grandchildren had all learned to ride on that horse. The family loved it. We loved it and used to pop by the field to feed it carrots. The family were worried the horse was too old to survive another Vermont winter so, in October, they shot it. It was the only way they could be sure the horse could be buried in their garden. Having tried to put the tent pole from a portable garage into the ground in November, I realize why our neighbors didn't keep the horse alive for a few more weeks.

Because our portable garage remains folded up in a box in the basement, the car takes a fair bit of time to defrost every morning. The windshield disappears behind layers of ice, the doors freeze shut, the engine refuses to start, the tires go flat. I have to prise open the driver's door, spend a few minutes persuading the engine to turn over, scrape ice from the windows, drive very slowly for the first few miles until the friction of the road against the tires causes them to reinflate.

One of the most beautiful things about very cold days is the silence. In part, that's because the snow muffles every sound; in part, it's because all the song birds have had the sense to go and live somewhere else. The silence on our side of the mountain is destroyed each morning around 7.15am when I start swearing. On a bad day, the car stays silent until nearly 7.30am.

Cold enough to spoil your groceries

When the local Burlington supermarket's freezer units broke last week, they put the frozen food into shopping carts and stored them in the car park. Their freezer units normally keep food at 0F (for my English readers, that's about -18C). On the day the freezers broke, the temperature outside was several degrees lower and the store manager told me she was concerned the food might spoil because she was having to keep it at too low a temperature.

So, if you want to understand what winter in Vermont feels like, climb into your freezer with a picture of some blue sky.

We get windchill too, but you'll have to imagine that.

Thanks Giving Thanks

I've always told my girls that we're rich. We have money enough to eat what we want to eat and to help a few of those who don't. That's my definition of wealth. To have too much is, in the words of a Fairground Attraction song, too absurd.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving in the US. The day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday. I love Thanksgiving. There is something great about a country whose main national holiday is about gathering together with friends and family to eat and talk and give thanks. Call me naive, but I think Thanksgiving brings out the best in people. Conversely, Black Friday provides example after example of the things which aren't so great about the US: a rampant consumerism, a blatant disregard for people other than oneself, a bloodthirsty hunger for a bargain. If you think I'm exaggerating, have a look at Black Friday Death Count, which monitors how many people are killed each year. Killed shopping.

I've recently been elected onto the board of a regional food shelf charity. We supply food to local people who've fallen on hard times, people who haven't got enough money in their pockets to buy the food they need, people who are described, in policy speak, as living in 'food insecure' households.  'Food insecure' means lacking reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. The cheapest way to eat in the US is to buy junk food - high calorie foods which have little nutritious content - so, ironically, symptoms of being 'food insecure' often include obesity. There are also strong correlations between being 'food insecure' and having chronic kidney disease, diabetes, behavioral problems, mental health issues, and hypertension. The problem is growing: 14.5% of the US population live in poverty, 49.1 million people live in 'food insecure' households across the US, and 1 in 5 Vermont children experience food hardship.

At the last food shelf meeting, John asked us for more money. His  name isn't really John, but he doesn't like to publicize the work he does so I would feel uncomfortable using his name on this blog. He's a Mason. I've always been wary about Masons - based purely on crass stereotypes of misogyny and funny handshakes. For the past six years, John has been on a mission to make sure that people can have a hot Christmas dinner. John is a man of high standards: the meals are delivered hot within an hour of being cooked, recipients choose what they would like to eat from a menu, the service is completely confidential, and this year John and his team estimate they will deliver 250 hot dinners to local families who would not otherwise have a Christmas dinner. They are informed about people in need through social services, confidential referrals from schools, and word of mouth.
 
'In a way that's just the start,' he said, leaning forward onto the table. 'We encourage our drivers to be sensitive. Last year, we delivered to a woman who asked for a small portion because she had nowhere to store leftovers. Within three days, we'd had a whip-round and delivered a fridge to her house. Another man told us he hadn't had a hot meal for several weeks because his stove had broken, so we arranged for a handyman to mend the stove and check the safety of the other gas appliances while he was there. There's lots more examples I could tell you, but the one which stays with me...' He paused, pushed his glasses down his nose and rubbed at his eyes. 'The one which always makes me want to keep doing this year after year was a little girl who ran out to the driver wearing flip-flops. There were a few inches of the snow on the ground. The driver made a joke about how brave she was running around nearly barefoot, and she just smiled and said she didn't have any proper shoes because they'd got too small for her. Within 24 hours, we were back at her door with $150 cash.'

John explained he was embarrassed to have to ask for a larger donation from us this year. When he started his charitable scheme in 2008, he could provide a full Christmas meal for $3.05. That included a starter, main and dessert with generous portion sizes (and, given that John was a generously sized man himself, I can only imagine what must be a 'generous portion' in his mind!). He works directly with suppliers to try and keep down costs. Everyone involved is a volunteer, drivers pay for their own gas, and the local school funds the kitchen expenses. Even so, this year he can't manage to provide the meal at less than $5.43 per head. Unemployment statistics might be going down as the US appears to recover from the recession and gas prices might be the lowest for 4 years, but the real cost of food is higher than it has ever been.

As part of their charitable activities, our local supermarket has a Helping Hands food box scheme. For a $10 donation, customers purchase a box filled with basic food stuffs - oatmeal, cereal, pasta, rice, peanut butters etc. - which is then donated to the local food shelf charity. On Sunday, the girls and I needed to collect that weekend's Helping Hands boxes and take them to the food shelf offices. People had donated three shopping carts' worth of boxes. It took a while to fit them all into the car. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to the Black Friday madness - filling my car with special deals and forcing my children to squash into the back seat among all the bargains. And it felt great.

Yoga greed

The yoga studio is stylish: stripped wood floors, exposed brick walls, ambient music playing in the background. Among the comfy sofas in the waiting area, a wide selection of expensive yoga clothing is displayed for sale. Burlington has a lot of yoga studios, but I can’t name this one in case they sue me. I know that wouldn't be very yogic behavior on their behalf, but underneath all the window dressing they’re not a very yogic place. 

The receptionist was sipping something beige and gloopy out of a see-through plastic cup. We’d met before. She wants to be a yoga teacher but hasn’t completed her training yet. If she hadn’t already told me how passionate she is about holistic health and how much she believes in maintaining the purity of the human body, I would have sworn she had a hangover.

Ideally, I wanted to see the finance manager, but the finance manager doesn't have a fixed schedule and hasn't been returning my calls. The studio prides itself on upholding a laid-back approach to the work place which, the receptionist had explained in one of our earlier conversations, counters the relentless, insidious corporate ethos of so many other businesses. It's possible this makes the staff happy, but it doesn't contribute towards excellent customer service. 

I smiled, said good morning, and explained I’d like to talk about the bills I'd been sent; and the receptionist winced slightly - which could have been hangover related, or might have been her reaction to me speaking about nasty materialistic money-type stuff.  

‘What exactly don't you understand?' she asked, flicking back a strand of her unbrushed brown hair and fiddling with the edge of one of her big silver earrings. 

'I don't understand why I owe you several hundred dollars when I paid for all my sessions up-front,'  

'I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that you'd paid,' she said.

'But I did pay,' I interrupted. ‘You swiped my credit card, I signed, and you took money from my account.'

'Actually, that doesn't mean you paid.' She scowled at me. 'We don’t know how much to charge for a session until we've contacted your insurance company.'

Medical insurance in the US is complicated:

1. The majority of people pay into some kind of medical insurance arranged by their employer. 
2. If you can’t pay for medical insurance, you’re screwed. (Iola’s school in Cambridge hosted a fund-raiser last year for a family whose 8-month old baby fell ill and died within 2 months. The family were about to have their home reclaimed and to declare themselves bankrupt because they couldn’t pay their dead child’s medical expenses. When I mention this to American friends, they can all think of similar scenarios with people they know). 
3. Some insurance providers operate 'co-pays', where the individual pays a flat rate up-front for each medical visit; other insurance providers have a 'deductible' which means the medical provider bills the insurance company who then bill the individual. The amount of the 'deductible' varies from insurance provider to insurance provider, from employer to employer, and from individual to individual. 
4. Once the 'deductible' amount has been met, a greater portion of medical costs are then covered by the insurance provider. (It has taken us several years to pay the deductible and other bills related to Maya breaking her leg nearly three years ago; it will likely take us several more years before we have paid all the costs associated with breaking my neck. Illness and injury in the US are comparable to taking on an additional mortgage.)
5. Different medical providers charge different amounts for the same services. So, for example, a mammogram might cost several hundred dollars with one hospital but several thousand dollars with another. 
6. And the same medical provider might charge different amounts for the same service depending upon the client's medical insurance provider. 

It is all very incestuous and almost impossible to untangle, and nobody likes talking about it very much. In the yoga studio in Burlington, the receptionist stared at her computer screen, as though hoping I might go away. 

'If I hadn't shown you my insurance card, would I owe you money? ' I asked. 

‘No,’ she answered. ‘If I hadn’t contacted your insurance company, the amount you'd paid would have covered the service.’

‘So it’s like going to the general store, and buying a gallon of milk.’ I began. ‘I pay $4 for the gallon of milk, but mention that Fred has given me the money to pay for the milk, at which point you decide to charge me $6.’

There is a particular facial expression some people use when they think they're talking to the village idiot; it tends to combine a tight plastic-y smile, clenched teeth and narrowed eyes. The receptionist put on her 'talking to the village idiot' face and spoke very slowly, 'You paid the amount it would have cost if you didn't have medical insurance. But you do have medical insurance. So you now owe this much money,’ she pointed at the bills I had put on her desk.

When I tried to explain I didn't think it was fair, the receptionist lost interest in our conversation. It's possible that, before trying to become a yoga teacher, she aced an assertiveness training course.'I'm not sure what you want right now,' she said. 'Some people like to vent because they feel bad about something, and if that is what you would like to do right now I am willing to listen. Other people want to understand a problem and, if that's what you want, then I have explained it to you and I am willing to repeat my explanation.'

I tried to take a slightly different tack. 'For my first session, I booked a yoga therapy evaluation. I was told it would cost $140. I paid $140. The session took slightly less than the hour I was told it would take. You have now sent me a bill which states I also received 'Therapeutic Exercise' for $110 and 'Neuromuscular Re-education' for $40. I did not ask for those services and, until I received this bill, I did not know I had received them.'

'How would you know?' she asked. 'You are not a medical expert.'

I still like yoga. I used to be able chattarunga with the best for them and my corpse pose is an absolute killer, but most yoga poses are more difficult for me now that I’m metal-necked and nerve-damaged. I'm pleased the receptionist and the finance manager benefit from working in an anti-corporate environment, even if it is funded by their extortion of additional funds from unsuspecting insurance providers. And I hope the finance manager returns my telephone calls one of these days. I haven't paid the bill yet because I still don't understand what I am paying for, so I'm sure she'll soon track me down with a reminder. While I’m waiting, I’m going to download a few yoga lessons from Amazon and set up my yoga mat in the corner of my bedroom. It's not a particularly stylish room, it lacks some of the atmosphere of the studio in Burlington and I'm sure there are ethical issues associated with using a large corporation like Amazon, but at least I'll know exactly what I'm paying for. 

Faith

I've been reading a lot lately: Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies; Barbara Glasson's I Am Somewhere Else; Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, and a heap of memoirs besides - accounts of misspent childhoods and voyages towards self-discovery. There's been a lot of 'God' on my bedside table and piles more on my desk: there's a half written letter to one of my closest, oldest friends who is being admitted into the Church of England as a Reader later this month; there's a little pile of gifts for two other, more recent but also very close friends, who are about to return to Australia - one to head a parish and the other to continue his academic career writing about Christianity. I've also been watching a slew of Netflix documentaries on Christianity, my favorite of which is 'For the Bible tells me so...' which includes the following film sketch (helpfully annotated here by Gay Star News).

My understanding of the Bible is similar to my understanding of Coronation Street - I grew up dipping into occasional episodes, and I have some understanding of the main characters, some memories of the main story lines, and a fascination with the more outlandish twists in the plot. I used to watch Coronation Street at my grandmother's house, glancing at the screen while sucking mint imperials and leafing through horse magazines; I used to sit through endless episodes of Christianity at our local church, half-listening but preoccupied by the village doctor snoring at the back of the choir stalls. By the time I became more interested in what was going on in the Bible and why, the village vicar had decided I was somewhat - ahem - "troublesome" and tended to avoid answering my questions on the rare occasions when he hadn't successfully managed to avoid me.

I don't watch Coronation Street anymore - in fact, I probably wouldn't recognize half the cast these days. The Bible has the advantage because their cast hasn't changed for centuries (except for the addition of a new saint every now and again), but rather than being reassured by the familiarity, I am increasingly frustrated. Primarily, I am frustrated about the absence of female characters and the awful behavior of those few women who have been written into the Bible's pages - Eve accidentally brings about the downfall of the entire human race; the only career advice Naomi thinks to give her recently widowed daughter-in-law is to sleep with a wealthy distant cousin (which proves the old adage that it's not what you know, but who... in the Biblical sense); Mary gives birth without a midwife (Really? The town was packed to the gunnels with females but none managed to help? Virtually every other birth in history is attended by females but not this one??!); Delilah gave Samson a bad haircut; Martha complained a lot about the housework; and Mary - the other one - gave Jesus an expensive foot massage.

I was in my 30s before I heard about Veronica. She's in that episode when Jesus is struggling to carry the cross to Golgotha and everyone is wailing and sobbing and gnashing their teeth on his behalf. Veronica steps forward and wipes his face with a damp cloth. I like that. It's something I hope I might do in those circumstances - to step forward and try to make a bit of a difference, even when there is not much anyone can do. Because I was excited about finding an admirable female in the Bible, I chose to sit next to a Jesuit priest later that week on a train journey from London to Scotland. He told me people normally choose not to sit next to him because they're put off by his religious habit. I think he might have preferred to sit alone, but I wanted to talk about Veronica and it felt like too good an opportunity to miss.
'What do you know about Veronica?' I asked as we drew out of King's Cross.
'Nothing really,' he answered.
'Really? Nothing?'
He shrugged and explained she wasn't an important part of the story.
We talked a lot over the next 4 hours, but it appeared there was really very little to say about Veronica.
Ten years later, I asked the Professor of Liturgical Theology at Harvard the same question. He's about as far removed from a Jesuit priest as you might imagine two people to be: one wears a brown habit, the other wears jeans; one has dedicated his life to obeying the Bible, the other one to deconstructing its message. But the Prof's shrug was similar.
'She probably didn't even exist,' he said, 'I suspect she might be a metaphor.'
The only woman I've found in the Bible who makes me want to encourage my children to read Bible stories, and she's probably just been made up by someone wanting to make some kind of theological point? Great.

I don't believe the Bible is the word of God, as some of my friends do, and I can't accept that every word contained on its pages is a great unquestionable Truth. In fact, if God was going to do the whole thing again and wanted my advice, I'd recommend he or she demanded a greater degree of editorial control.

But I'm not willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater, either. I'm not willing to reject my sense of wonder and amazement, to neglect my faith that something beyond humanity makes the world a better place and offers help in times of need (even when we don't or can't or won't listen). I'm wary of people who interpret the Bible literally and use it to justify their prejudices, but I also know that some of the most amazing people I have ever met are guided by a profound sense of faith - to name a few, I'm thinking of Anne Shumway and her dedication to vulnerable women across Massachusetts, of Pastor Rick and his peace work in Jerusalem, of Rev. Sekou and his determination that the voices of the people in Ferguson, MI will be heard because that is the only way the conflict will be fairly resolved. There are many, many more. In fact, I'm sure that for every bigot who uses the Bible for their own means, there are far more people working within religious communities to make the world a better place. And I am glad of them.

I don't know where any of this leads me, or leaves me. But I've been reading and I've been thinking and God has been on my mind.

Words, faces and electric shocks

Some things seem inevitable: the stiffness in my neck and shoulders; the constant low-level pain; the restrictions in my movements; the itchiness around the area where my scar is healing (my scar, by the way, still looks spectacular - a kind of hybrid between bad-ass zombie war wound and Zippy's fastened shut mouth in the 1970s' tv show, Rainbow.)

But there are other things besides.  

1. Words

Because of the shattered bones in my neck and the real fears of paralysis, the medical team gave little attention to the lacerations in my scalp at the time of my admission to hospital. By the time they'd operated and I'd recovered from the anesthesia, the holes had mostly scabbed over and the nurses were unsurprisingly reluctant to poke about at my head when it was only connected to my body by a few bits of metal and a screw or three.

I began to notice my word confusion during my time at the rehabilitation center. Very specifically, I noticed my relationship with words had shifted when I spent an entire morning trying to find the word 'anatomy'. But this was during the 'hey, be grateful!' part of my recovery: a period where anything I noticed or pointed out about my condition merely emphasized how fortunate I was to not be (a) dead, (b) severely brain-damaged, or (c) in a wheelchair. (I am still exceptionally grateful for those things in a way I cannot easily put into words, I just don't use the exclamation mark as frequently.) 

By the time my 6 week check-up came around (starring the beautifully made up physician's assistant and the blue-eyed surgeon), I knew something was wrong. My words were addled and my short-term memory was shot. The beautiful physician's assistant pouted at the computer screen and scrolled through some of the CT scans which had been taken on the night of the accident, but she seemed unenthused - as though they were part of a soap opera episode she had already seen. By this point we'd also moved into the 'Let's Wait and See' part of my recovery, so her response to my concerns was, inevitably, 'Let's Wait and See' - delivered with a smile, before she went to touch up her mascara.

I've been obediently doing a lot of 'waiting' and 'seeing' lately, but I've also been talking a lot of nonsense. 

The typical morning in our house involves me chivvying the girls to get ready for school:

'Come on, Iola. You need to get your school sandwich ready.'

'I'm on school dinners, mmmmy.'

'Not your school sandwich - your school bag. Obviously, your school bag. Have you taken it out of the kitty litter yet?'

'The kitty litter?'

'No, not the kitty litter - the boot room! Have you taken your school bag out of the boot room?'

The girls are now so used to their mother being linguistically inept that they either laugh or try and guess what I really mean. It's more difficult when my words get messed up in front of strangers. 

For example, yesterday afternoon I'd arranged a play-date with another mother and her two daughters. We don't know one another well, but I enjoy her company hugely and I was looking forward to her visit. A few hours before her visit, she sent an email explaining the complexity of her day but saying she would probably be on time. I replied, telling her it wasn't a problem. Or I thought I'd told her it was 'no problem', until I opened the email later that evening. I had actually written that I was sure there was 'no probability' of her being on time. Hmmm, charming. I don't know if she thought I was rude or existentialist, or a mixture of the both, but I'll apologize next time I see her... if I remember.   

2. Faces

My accident happened two weeks after moving to Vermont. My children attend two different schools which means I need to know the names of about 15 new teachers and school staff, as well as smiling vaguely at more than 50 parents as we stand around at the end of the school day waiting to collect our little darlings. We also have new neighbors, I see new faces on dog walks, and I smile somewhat hopefully at the same people who serve me in the local shops, the post office, the library etc. It would be challenging enough to remember everyone's name even if I still had a short-term memory.

I have clearly offended some people - asking several times which child is theirs, or forgetting to acknowledge someone whom I was talking with only a few days earlier. Other people find it hilarious: Dan - who might be called Dave but seems to answer to both - has offered to write out name cards for people to wear whenever they speak to me, and Iola's class teacher suggested I might make a set of flashcards with people's names and faces on them. My concern about this second is that it risks ending up becoming a completely inappropriate version of Happy Families!

3. Electric Shocks

I've never been a fan of shopping, but nowadays it hurts. The worst culprit is the local organic supermarket which is all craft-beers and organic cotton yoga tops and homeopathic medicines. This morning I suffered 18 electric shocks between the kale counter and the kombucha bar. At the customer services counter, a young woman with enormous deer-like eyes, long hair and long silver earrings smiled as I approached.
'Does anyone else suffer shocks when they shop here?' I asked. 

'Shocks?' She nodded, but it seemed an involuntary movement - the infinite action of a nodding dog toy sitting on the parcel shelf of a car rather than an indicator of human agreement. 'Like what kind of shocks?'

'Electric shocks,' I said. 

'Hmmm,' she put her head slightly to one side, but continued nodding. 'Electric shocks.'

'They hurt,' I said. 'And it happens every time I shock here.'

'You shock here?'

'No. Obviously I shop here because that's why I'm here with my shopping cart and my collection of reusable shopping bottles, but your store gives me shocks and I have this thing with words right now.'

There was a lot more I was about to say but a look, midway between alarm and fear, crossed her beautiful deer eyes and, for a brief moment, she stopped nodding. It seemed like a good point to shrug and leave.

On the positive side, I won't recognize the long earring-ed customer services person when I next go into the store, which will give her plenty of opportunities to avoid me. On the less positive side, it means I'm no closer to a solution of how to buy my organic carrots and ethnically scented candles without repeatedly electrocuting myself. I had wondered about trying to find a home delivery service, but the combination of my tendency to use the wrong words and my inability to remember what I want could make this a very expensive mistake. Instead, I'll put on rubber-soled shoes and do the old-person shuffle around the store in the hope that it might make it less shocking. I can console myself, at least, with the knowledge that I won't remember the humiliation in too many details by the time I've driven back home. 

The mountain

No longer broken but not yet quite whole, I accidentally climbed the mountain.

Sunday was a good day for a walk: the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the mountain was at her most fetching. A little tall, perhaps, but not ridiculously so.

The higher you climb, the smaller the trees. Here's a photo of Nathan being a Wood-elf King (we live in Underhill, for heaven's sake, and need to reference Tolkien and hobbits at least once a day...)

After a while, the trees gave up completely. On a camera better than mine, you'd see New York State and the Adirondacks spread out on the horizon beyond Lake Champlain. But look at the sweat on Nathan's t-shirt. See? We'd earned that view and it looks like we're at the top, doesn't it? Mountains are like that. Deceptive beasts, leading you on, pulling another challenge out of the bag just when you think you've won them over.

I learned a lot on Sunday. First, you know those thin pale gray lines on maps? The gradient ones? This photo shows what happens when they're really, really, really close together. And, second, when the Appalachian Mountain Club describe a walk as 'extremely challenging', they're not kidding. (It was around this point on the walk that I made the decision to believe every single word of every single thing I read from this moment on). Third, I learned how much my broken neck has affected my entire upper body strength. Three months ago, I could lift any of the boxes our removal men hoisted around; now, I'm significantly weaker and the nerve damage to my hands and arms means I don't always know where my hands are gripping unless I can see them. I managed to scramble up after Nathan (and follow him up a few other similar climbs besides), but it was not pretty and it was not elegant.

The trail was made in the 1910s by some free-thinking creative Vermonters. In the places where the gradient was too steep to scramble, they drilled tunnels. Perhaps they were as tired of climbing as I was by this point in the trail's design. Standing up there at silly-thousands of feet, I could hear their voices from over a hundred years before...
"Damn your eyes, Fitzgerald, there's another scramble here."
"Might I suggest a little dynamite, sir?"
Whatever. I like tunnels. I really like tunnels. Tunnels mean you don't have to scramble up near vertical rock faces or leap across 5ft ravines. Regardless of how many times Nathan banged his head (because even free-thinking Edwardian Vermonters didn't build tunnels for men who stand 6'7'' in their socks), I will not have a bad word said against them.

I'm not sure if I expected an easier walk because we started from our front door (there's always that strange psychological glitch which suggests something is only truly adventurous if you have had to make a journey to get there), or because my broken neck is stopping me from thinking straight. And I'm still not quite sure how I hadn't understood that our path was taking us to the top of the mountain. But we did it, and the fact I cried twice, bit through my lip on one of the ascents, and could barely move for a few days' afterwards is neither here nor there.

The true testament of the walk is in this photo. It's taken me nearly 2 years, but - look! - I finally wore out the dog.

And this is what I look like after climbing a mountain with a broken neck. You'd never know, would you.

The problem with history

It was Iola who started the conversation with the man at Shelburne Museum. We were in the museum's printing shop: a real-life museum exhibit with an authentic assortment of large cast iron presses, printing materials, and an elderly man with half-moon glasses, a large printer's apron, and a face filled with carefully tended facial hair. 

Iola looked around at the alphabet posters which decorated the walls of the shop: 'O could be for Owl too,' she suggested

The man studied her for a moment over the top of his glasses, sniffed slightly and replied, 'Here O is for Oven.'

He is, I soon discovered, a man who does not like the possibility that things might be different from how he thinks they are. 

Iola had started the conversation, but he looked over her head and began talking to me. Together we admired the black iron hand press which he had used to produce the alphabet posters. It was his favorite and had, for many years, been the only one in the world. The corners of the man's mouth drooped suddenly. 'Then somebody found another one in New Jersey.'

I offered my condolences.

'There have been historians...' his face contorted slightly as though the word 'historian' tasted bad, '... who have looked at this hand press and the one in New Jersey. They said that this one was built in Boston, then the shop burnt down and the press maker moved to Philadelphia where he built the press which is now in New Jersey.'

I nodded, half-listening. 

'But!' His shout made both Iola and I jump, 'If that's the case then how can the New Jersey press have been built in 1826 when the Boston shop didn't burn down until 1831?'

He raised his eyebrows towards me, as though expecting me to answer. I couldn't. 

'Exactly! So, the historians go away for a while. Then they come back and say that means the New Jersey press was built first in Philadelphia, and the press maker moved to Boston afterwards.' 

'OK.'

'No, not ok!' He placed his hand flat against the press. 'This is obviously the older of the two presses - look at the shape of the handle here? At the way this part is engraved?'

I looked but, to be honest, neither thing meant much to me. 'What do the historians say now?' 

'They don't.' The printing press man pushed his spectacles up his nose slightly and smiled. 'They've gone away again and won't talk to me anymore.' 

While Iola wandered around the shop, I continued chatting to the printing press man. I enthused about the developments in technology which had enabled Mormons to carry small mobile printing presses on their travels in the early 1800s; how each new gold-rush settlement would somehow manage to set up a press and establish a local newspaper, even when the town had only appeared seemingly overnight. I thought he was interested, I thought we were having a conversation, until he interrupted. 

'The real problem is the patent office burnt down in 1836.'

'Oh.'

'So there are no printed records.' He traced two fingers along the engraving at the top of the machine, as though caressing the hair of a favorite child, and then leaned forward conspiratorially. 'I've got a theory,' he said softly, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. 'I've traced back her owners to 1860 and I''m not going to give up. I don't think she was made by the man they think made her!'

'Oh.'

Iola reappeared and tugged at my hand. I wished him success with his hunt and said goodbye, but he didn't answer because he was already telling another museum visitor how the hand press used to be the only one in the world. 

We made up other alphabet posters as we walked around the museum grounds: W was for Walrus because of the size of the man's moustache, U was for Unique, in case the hand press really was the only one in the world, and O... Well, O is for Oh because sometimes there is nothing else one can say.