by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – A few months ago my companion Bea (a very charming widow of whom you have heard me speak previously) was chatting with a divorced friend and happened to mention that she was keeping company with an elderly widower. “Does he live near you?” the[Read More…]
A Yankee Notebook
They’ll Never Gain
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – For years and years folks got along with an old grandfather’s clock, Or just a common old sun dial sittin’ out on a block. Then the dollar watch it had its day and wrist watch it was fine. Then along came a man who[Read More…]
The Gods Finally Woke Up
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – What would you have done? I was committed to a Friday-Sunday weekend down by the seashore in Nahant, just north of Boston, and I had a fund-raiser commitment Thursday at a senior living community in Peterborough, sort of halfway there from Montpelier. It didn’t[Read More…]
I’ve Been Lucky so Far
For all of your days be prepared, And meet them ever alike: When you are the anvil, bear – When you are the hammer, strike. Edwin Markham by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – That seemed like a pleasant little nostrum when I was in high school,[Read More…]
They’ve Been Places and Seen Things
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – It’s for years irritated me that my fellow countrymen know so little about their next-door neighbor to the north. When my friends and I in the Geriatric Adventure Society first began traveling to the Arctic for our biennial canoe trips on the so-called Barren[Read More…]
That Love-Hate Relationship
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – A lot of us who live here have a love-hate relationship with leaf-peepers. On the one hand, their annual migration to look at our autumn leaves brings in millions of dollars, and our tourist bureaus, whose job is to encourage that sort of behavior,[Read More…]
Don’t be too Hard on Us
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – The calendar claims it’s the first of October. The thermometer claims it’s the first of August (and will, until next Saturday). The soft maple outside my kitchen window, always the first tree on the property to turn, already has turned so far that, like[Read More…]
We Sophisticates Tend to Smile at Such Nonsense
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – Creatures commonly called brownies have been with us for centuries, and have operated under dozens of names. In pre-scientific times they were thought to cause inexplicable domestic phenomena, like the curdling of milk, the reappearance of items thought lost, or a fresh cow going[Read More…]
We Spent Christmas Huddled in her House
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – Most of the time, living as we do at the business end of a climatological bowling alley, we watch our weather approach from the west. This time it was coming at us from the southeast. For over a week we’d been watching the progress[Read More…]
I Wasn’t Quite Ready for Idyls
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – During the 1960s I taught high school English in a riverside village on the west side of Lake Champlain. Looking back, I can see that the situation for our small family was idyllic. But in my early thirties, I wasn’t quite ready for idyls;[Read More…]
What Could Possibly go Wrong?
by Willem Lange EAST MONTPELIER – Wednesday, 7/30, 10 p.m. Cold, rainy, windy. Still wind-bound. Blew hard all day. Fished up and down the canyon with Baird, slept, read. Can’t move till the wind dies. Bob’s barometer still dropping. Half the fuel is gone, and we’ve seen barely a pencil[Read More…]
