Closer to fine

After the eighteen months of wandering through the desert (though having moments of hospitality), after eight discernment committee processes, I finally ended up fifteen miles from where I last served a congregation. I considered congregations in MA, CT and even Mexico. And when everything settled down, I landed at the congregation where Anne has been attending since 1994, eleven miles from our tiny house.


The preacher at the service of installation and celebration of a new season of ministry, the Rev'd Gwen Groff, a local Mennonite pastor, said eloquently:

... Which leads me to the last thing that Lee wanted us to focus on. This land. This thin place on the earth. Lee said what she is interested in is "connecting with the land and living in a thin place." The term "thin place" has been used in many ways, but I believe the phrase was originally used by the Celts, whose theology said that there are places on earth where the veil between heaven and earth is very thin, places that serve almost like a portal where you can practically reach through or step through and experience God.

Now I think of those sacred places as destinations, a place you travel to as a deliberate pilgrimage, or stumble upon unexpectedly. Lee's words, that she is interested in what it means to live in a thin place made me think of thin places a bit differently. Because if the psalmist is right, and Basil is right, that God's Holy Spirit is everywhere, then one place isn't more "thin" than another. A thin place need not be a windswept stone circle built on an energetic convergence of ley lines. A thin place is anywhere our hearts are opened to God. God is always here. But in a thin place we are more open to God, we are suddenly made aware of God's constant presence, and we are more likely to take risks of listening and being transformed.

A thin place is not only a place we feel something; it's a state of being where we become more like the God we meet when our hearts are open. A thin place can be experienced in worship. This sanctuary is worn thin by the prayers that have been spoken here. And a thin place can be experienced in action, in working across differences and finding God in the other. [(c) Gwen Groff, 14 June 2013]

Church of Our Saviour, with its long history of farmer priests, its close connection to the land, and its Benedictine tradition all make for a peaceful, peace-filled spot in the Vermont Greens. COS is where the priest truly can live out relational priesthood, come back close to a vocational rather than professional priesthood, live with one foot in the 19th century when this place was founded and the 21st where it lives and reaches out to the local community.

I feel exceptionally at peace here, in a way that I have not since 2008 when I left Northfield. This sense of 'coming down' right was solidified as today I attended a wedding reception of two former parishioners. As I talked with other members of where I last served, I gave thanks again that I am no longer in that stressful place. Somehow COS seems more authentic, closer to the ground, not lost in pretense.

To my delight, I once again have a vegetable garden with potatoes (I no longer remember what types), green, purple and yellow beans, tomatoes and lots of hot peppers. The beans are sprouting as are the 'taters and the peppers and 'maters are coming along. No, I won't be Fr Dan or Fr Heminway in cassock out on a tractor (the church doesn't have one), but in a small way, I can tap into the ethos of the farmer priest which is so much a part of the history of this place.

Now... if any of you have $30K out there, it would go a long way to helping us repair the vicarage chimneys and replace the roof, and shore up a collapsing barn, all of which are on the National Historic Registry (!).

[Blogger ain't wordpress; formatting here is disastrous.]

A month later

It now has been more than a month since Agatha died. I keep her ashes, fur, paw print, heart and candle in the gold bag in which they arrived when I picked them up from the vet. They sit on the window sill to my desk so that when I look out to the little shed, I see the bag knowing what it contains. It is not that Agatha spent time sitting in front of me, but she did sleep in the baskets that were on either side of me. To add to the collection, I have a little shrine, half serious, half silly, for her.

A friend gave me the little Saint Gertrude statue. I had no idea she was the matron saint of cats. So she watches over Agatha and the two are on a little knitted prayer rug from another friend's congregation. The photo of Agatha is when she was still feeling well (April 2009) and looking her imperious self. But, oh, we still miss her.

However, life goes on.

This is what I see most mornings: August in my face as he stands on my chest ready to lick my forehead (I think I must have an invisible 'M' that most tabby cats have) or, worse, my eyes.

This 1817 house has heaters that are just the right height for making cat nests. These two are sleeping on top of a box that still has kitchen utensils in it. No matter, under the ratty towel is a pillow and the two bask in the forced hot air heat. I suspect Aelred (Orange Guy) was there first.

The evening after August killed a vole in the kitchen, I decided to let things settle down in there so shut them out of the back part of the house (dining room and kitchen). When I came downstairs, they rushed to the door so I had pity on them and let them in. Always a stampede.

Meanwhile, I occasionally have reason to drive around Vermont. This photo shows Killington/Pico taken from Rte I-89, heading south in Randolph. I still struggle with the idea that I am going to have to leave these beloved mountains.



And here is Camels Hump taken from Rte 2 in Burlington.

Vermont got off easy with the blizzard of 2013. We got the usual 12-14 inches. The town plows create cement walls that are tough to shovel or snow blow one's way through; I did penetrate the walls on Saturday and my shoulders are still complaining.

Mission Farm Road on Saturday 9 February. It used to be Rte 4 but now is a tranquil side road, perfect for taking walks (one mile long).

The Guest House at Mission Farm and breezeway between the GH and vicarage. We cleared away a bay in the shed so I could get my car in there. It is a tight fit, only an inch on either side of the rear view mirrors and it doesn't completely protect the car but it is an improvement from having a car turned into a blob of snow. This photo was before I started working on the driveway and walkways.

I live here (loving it), now in my fifth month, but there is such provisionality to it that I haven't unpacked and am trying hard not to settle in. It has been almost a year since I moved out of the rectory. And frankly, life has not been secure since I left Northfield  in November 2008. Security is illusory, for sure, but sometimes it can seem steadier.


I occasionally have to remind myself that I am still and always will be a priest (photo taken at the cathedral before a RHE for a colleague last month). I passed my 19th anniversary two weeks ago and find myself in my 20th year still unemployed. I supply on Sundays so at least I am connected that way with an aspect of priesthood. To an outsider it probably looks as though I am doing nothing but I have been wrestling all this time with the distinction between the vocational and professional priesthood. It seems to me that as churches diminish in numbers, size and income, those who serve congregations will be forced to return to a vocational priesthood in which the main source of income no longer comes from the congregation but from another job. The priesthood, the esse, will be part of the individual but the individual will not have the luxury (or challenge depending on how one looks at it) of spending all of his or her time within the confines of the church. Twenty years ago, this sort of priest was called a tent-maker or bi-vocational priest. Call it what you may but for those of us who wish to stay in the northeast where churches are many, congregations are small, this looks like the future. My problem is age and experience... for a struggling congregation calling a priest at the top of the pay scale (my diocese's pay scale tops out at twenty years and then it is just a percentage added on) is not optimum.

So what to do? Where to go? How to live this vocation out? During this desert time of discernment, I keep trying to figure out what priesthood means to me and how I am being called to live into it. I know that a vocational call is one that is impossible, persistent, good for all and one that others see for you, and that is well and good. But what about the interior landscape? I still don't know other than the idea of leaving the only diocese I have really served (all but ten months of ordained ministry) is unappealing. However, the options truly are running out.

Sometimes the only thing I can do is meditate or, in this case, pray with the General Ordination Exam readers as we gather in community for compline.



So, things are quiet. I just don't have a lot to say. [Nor do I have the patience to figure out the oddball formatting here.]

Gardening

A dozen or so of us
helped Eric with his garden
today.

A cookie jar
that he would take to his
wife, Elaine,
and say, 'The jar is empty,'
and she'd fill it
with wonderful home-made
cookies
sat on a shawl of hers.

Today, though,
the jar held Elaine's
ashes
and we gently and lovingly
scattered them in her
garden midst the rows
and plants now
fallow
awaiting the spring blooms.

And while some chose to
wash their hands after
scattering these holy ashes,
I did not,
preferring instead
to let them seep into my skin,
to take Elaine's spirit
into my hands
only to lift them up
to the sky
and commend her
to God.

A new place to abide... for a spell

Church of Our Saviour, Killington, VT is nestled between two ridges; it is on the Killington Flats right across from the ski resort lift, the Skyeship. The vicarage (building furthest to the left) is an 1830s house; an older one was there before. Next to it is the Guest House which the church runs and finally the church, an 1895 stone structure. The church in the past was served by a farmer priest and, indeed, in the 50s-80s, the priest cultivated some of the 170 acres that the church owns.

When the most recent vicar retired, I asked if I could move into the vicarage because 1) I wanted to get out from a landlord who nickled and dimed the lessees; 2) I thought my money would be more appreciated by the church; 3) there would be someone living in the house which is on a very-well travelled side road. The Executive Committee of the church agreed and so I moved in on 7 September.

This, again, is a stop-gap measure because they will look for a new priest and I need to find a cure somewhere else, despite it being so convenient here... for the time I reside here, I will appreciate the peace of the church, the tranquility of the valley. Kirstin's ashes are across the street from the vicarage in the church orchard and her spirit helps me, too.

Someday this past year will make sense. Right now, I know it has been ten months of unemployment and the one thing that keeps me connected to the priesthood is supplying on Sundays. Even that, though, will dry up in October.

So I drift aimlessly. At least for the time being, I am in a valley so I can't get too far off course. And the mountains are close by which provides for good walking.

364 days later

On this night, 27 August 2011, a year ago, the owner of this house went to bed, as normal, never expecting that by the end of the next day the house would look like this. The owner probably never expected that a year later, the house would still look like this as the owner awaits a settlement from FEMA.

Yesterday about eighty residents of the small town here gathered for a potluck lunch to give thanks for the first responders and the general esprit de corps that held people together in the first days post Irene. Little old Plymouth was one of the isolated thirteen towns (though it was ignored initially despite having all three ways in and out cut off and within the town borders was divided in three, like Gaul), so people had to rely on one another in the confusion of the days after Tropical Storm Irene passed through.

A local 501 c 3 has collected enough money to help the owner of this house and the other people whose homes were destroyed or properties ravaged by the flood waters.

Yesterday we took a tour of a man's property that had been surrounded by a wall of water on both sides. Remarkably the house was OK; the septic field failed when the brook bed disappeared; the little waterfall they had enjoyed disappeared in the flood. As he walked us around, showing us all the changes to his property and narrating what happened, I had a sense of déjà vu, of being with other people who had gone through disasters (notably in El Salvador), who point out what was and is no longer and, in the process of pointing out things, have an opportunity to tell their story.

Tomorrow night at 7.00PM residents of Vermont are invited to ring bells for a minute. It is a symbolic time; waters raged for several days more, but by 7.00PM on Sunday 28 August 2011, we already had realised that our state had changed vastly in the course of twelve hours.

Now, 364 days later, we pray for those in the path of Isaac, praying they will not have to go through what we went through, but knowing that already the people of Haiti have.

May God have mercy on all of us.

Who'd known?

Anne smiles after Jane has signed the marriage license.

Who'd known? Never in a hundred, thousand, million, billion years did I ever expect to have the legal status of 'married.' For 12 years, Anne and I have been legally joined in a Vermont civil union — we had our holy/civil union in August 2000, a month after civil unions, a radical act indeed, became legal in Vermont.

Time went on, other states moved to marriage equality, Vermont came on board, too, but the legislature did not automatically convert pre-existing civil unions to marriage.

So, ten days shy of our 12th anniversary of our holy/civil union and in our 23rd year of being together, we had lunch with six dear friends, talked all about General Convention, the state of the church, peace concerns (notably Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq) and just enjoyed one another's company. We all sat outside on a screened porch and one of the household cats periodically came out to try to catch bugs.

In the course of the afternoon, Jane, who presided at our holy/civil union signed our license, thereby dissolving the civil union (a bit odd, I'd say) and converting our status to being married in the eyes of the state of Vermont. And then we toasted the whole day, the twelve years, the 22 years with some Gruet champagne.

Does this change our status with the Feds? Of course not. Anne will continue to pay 20+% in taxes on any medical reimbursements I receive because in the eyes of the Feds we are not related.

But she and I know we are related and more. And we know it. To celebrate, tonight we had Bierzo, special wine that reminds us of the Camino de Santiago.

Continuing transition

A year ago as I was contemplating 'jumping off the cliff,' by leaving Trinity, I honestly did not think I would be unemployed a year later and having to move yet again. But that seems to be what is in the cards for me. The difference is that this time I am packing up my things without a clue to where I will move. I just know I need to leave the place where I currently am living because the rent has become prohibitive.

Any priest in The Episcopal Church knows how glacially slow parish discernment processes can be. While I may be in conversation about two, I know realistically that we are talking until late fall at this point.

Meanwhile, the state of Vermont approaches the first year of Irene when a lot of people's lives were turned upside down in ways far worse than mine. I guess we are all in it together.

Néant or drifting, take your pick

The days just drift past with little to differentiate one from the next. Occasionally I have a meeting or appointment and yesterday supplied at a church 40 miles away.

Otherwise, life up at the end of a dirt road is extremely quiet.

So I read and read. I actually like this set-up on the front doorstep. The house has a built-in planter that demanded flowers and vinca vine. And there has to be an outrageous hibiscus to complete the scene. The fish gizmo was in a snowbank when I moved in. Who knows to which tenant when it belonged? The chair desperately needs to be repainted; I sanded it down and painted it when I moved to Vermont 18 years ago. (The basket on the chair is what I use to carry my prayer book, amice, cincture, shoes and sundries when I supply.)

As for the reading? The Blue Book (digitally on my iPad), the Barefoot Sisters' account of walking the Appalachian Trail southbound and then northbound, Guy Deslisle's Jerusalem (had I known it was originally in French, I would have tracked it down), Terry Tempest Williams' latest, When Women Were Birds, and Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name... all delicious and since I have the time, I read. (I vowed I was not going to buy any more books, but just could not resist these.)

I also have been hankering to get out and walk, partly to see if the injury from last August (when I landed on a rock and banged my ankle and gave myself a humungous hematoma that still is on my calf and from which I still have edema in my ankle and foot) and mostly because I need to walk things out as I wait and wait to see if I have been called to a congregation and, if not, think about what will I do, and avoid the reality that I must move again by 15 August. Reading and hiking are good ways to escape.

So call it nothingness or drifting, in some ways they are one and the same.

But progress none the less

The new bridge opened at noon and we drove over it four and a half hours later. The sun even deigned to shine as we crossed the bridge. Everyone we saw crossing it also had a smile on their face.

To situate this bridge, it is right by the Long Trail Ale brewery. They have a terrific restaurant (good hamburgers) and obviously beer. They are sponsoring a century ride late June to raise money for Vermont Adaptive Sports. (And, no, they did not pay me for this plug.) That's a twenty-miler. Yeah, I think I could do that (slowly).

Slow progress

No one can really remember just how long this bridge has been out for repair, we think six or seven years, maybe it was to have opened last summer, but then along came Irene and knocked it sideways into the temporary bridge which meant more repairs... ironically, the fact that it was NOT finished last summer meant that we lost neither bridge.

The state could have put up a concrete span, but it wanted to replicate the old bridge which was one of the many built after the 1927 flood. They all were like this bridge.

I just got an email from someone who lives just by it; she said she drove over the new bridge today. If I weren't going in the other direction to the vet, I would also drive over it to say I crossed the Ottauquechee on the new bridge on its first day of operation. I may yet.

+++

That is how things are these days... slow, very slow. Patience rewards us from time to time, but the in-between periods seem long, very long.

Up here at the end of a dirt road, life is even slower. I am trying to have some sort of a daily rhythm, so I don't utterly lose contact with the outside world. Now that the summer is trying to arrive (don't believe it — I wore a turtleneck and sweater yesterday, and last night needed two wool blankets), I can sit out on the front entrance in a favourite funky chair and read in the morning... in the afternoon, after a walk down to the post office, if it is not raining, I can read in the hammock. And there is reading the Blue (salmon) Book for General Convention.

However, this semblance of normalcy covers up the inexorable fact that come 15 August, I have to be out of the house I am currently renting. Where I will move, I do not know. Will I have a cure? I do not know; maybe by the end of this month I will have an idea of what next.

The uncertainty colours everything. It is impossible not to have it sitting there in the pit of my stomach. Even though I try to ignore it, I know it is there. On the one hand, my mind says, 'Let this whole ball of wax be an adventure.' On the other hand, my mind asks, 'What did you do to get into this mess? Will it ever end?'

Above all, looms the possibility of having to leave my beloved Vermont... after all we have been through together, that is the worst thought. But it may be what will happen next.

So to God I say: I am all yours.

[barn at Church of Our Saviour, Killington VT]

I am Vermont Strong redux

So, even though my fourteen year-old car is beginning to show signs of rust and the people who replaced the windshield five years ago did such a lousy job of sealing it that the seal comes loose (as it is again) and has caused rust, I still am proud to replace my front license plate with 'I am Vermont Strong.' We can use these plates for the next two years (now that the legislature changed the law to permit us). I see more and more of them as I drive around Vermont, which still has tons and tons (literally) of river silt and debris from Irene eight months ago.

And, oh, how I hope I can stay in Vermont, my adopted home. It all is so uncertain. For as long as I live here, though, I will try to be Vermont strong.

A new way of being

The past

The present

On 20 February, the movers came and took all my big stuff out of the rectory and moved it (with some great difficulty getting up our icy road) to the rental house I have until July. Yesterday, on Leap Year Day, after thoroughly cleaning the rectory, I walked out of it for the last time.

Thus beginneth the new way of being.

Agatha now is in our little house by herself. She seems much happier without the other three. Our little house is 100 yards away from the rental house.

For the first time in twenty years, I do not have my La Palma angels flying over my head. Instead, I have a window which means I can look out at the stars (or snow) even as I lie there.

Aelred also can look out the window... at Anne who is snowblowing the driveway in front of my car.

Aelred and August explored the house today (poor Sophia is at the vet recovering from having her right canine extracted — she broke it years ago, missing the counter as she tried to jump up on it). Aelred seemed OK with things. August was terrified.

My wonderful Salvadoran aumbry now has a new home in my study. On the shelf below it, my amice and cincture lie ready to be used... they will be on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Easter when I supply at another Vermont Episcopal church.

It is going to take a while to dig the car out tomorrow but I must, because I have a funeral to attend and then go to Rutland to get Sophia.

The new way of being is that I do not have land line at the house; therefore, I do not have internet there. I can get the microcell signal from our house so my phone gets one bar; I am not totally cut off but working off an iPhone for the internet is tedious. So I am living a quasi retreat-like experience of dragging my laptop down to our house for the evening hours, knowing that when I go back up the hill, I am once again offline.

Now that I am fully out of the rectory and, therefore, completely finished with Trinity, it is time to start looking for a new cure. I know that will take time but I must get going.

In any event, the past two weeks have been full, very full, so full that I took a two-hour nap this afternoon... with both August and Aelred keeping me warm.

Four months

Four months ago, the worst of Irene had struck our beloved state of Vermont. These scenes had already taken place: Rte 4 had already washed out in Mendon, Rutland was flooded and there was so much we did not know.

Irene barrelled through Vermont a week after I resigned because I had finally extracted from the wardens that they would not call me as rector.

As Vermont Public Radio has had an update today on where things are for people affected by Irene, I realise that in my own way, I have been carrying all this stuff on my heart.

No wonder I am sad every time I drive into Plymouth Union and see the wreckage caused by Irene. I think of Sue, whose house was destroyed by the brook that ran by it [in picture; she put up the 'house for sale' sign as a joke]. I think of the elderly couple in the house two over whose house was condemned. And I think of the people down the road whose house still stands but the first floor needs total gutting.

My situation is so minor in the great scheme of things. But it is inextricably woven into the story of Irene. Thus, the retrospectives throw me back to those last days of August which were so crazy.

A new way of reading the land

Now when we drive around Vermont we have a new way of reading the land... not just where the brooks and rivers ate away their banks and caused all manner of trees and boulders to fall into the water but also the roads...when one sees the following, one knows that the floods post Irene caused this change:

mangled guard rails
iron trestle bridges smashed up against the river bank
gravel on the edge of the road
tilting electric/phone polls
white rif-raf (large gravel) on the edge of the road
newly paved patches or complete segments of the road

This all is going to cost a small fortune and it is absolutely amazing that as many of our roads are up and open again. This said, I still did not try 107 from Bethel to Stockbridge today.

Mill River

It was such a gorgeous day today that I ignore the cold I have and the leaf peeper crowds and the packing I have to do and the sermons I have to write (tomorrow and funeral Monday) and took off for a short walk on the LT/AT. I haven't been out since I fell in the NH Whites two months ago and gave myself a huge haematoma and banged my ankle so any stamina I had had is long gone.

Clarendon Gorge and the Mill River were altered by Tropical Storm Irene. This leaf is in a dry spot that up until 28 August 2011 was underwater. The river flows with greater volume of water today than three weeks ago but it still is not the river of this summer.

This whale-like rock also was underwater; the force of the river smoothed it out to transform its shape, to soften its edges. It is now covered with fine river silt.

This living water flows far too fast and strong for any nice baptisms. It churns enough to make one dizzy watching it.

I don't know how many more times I will have to return, how long it will take until my presence will be but a shadow of memory.

Keeping Vigil

This week a lovingly-made sachet [the purple square with butterflies at the base of the vase] of rosemary arrived from California. It is no ordinary sachet but a holy one for interspersed with the rosemary (for remembrance) are some of Kirstin's ashes. Before the snow falls, which could be any day, a couple of us will gather to commit them to God's care in the orchard at Church of Our Saviour, Killington, VT.

Church of Our Saviour is a tiny congregation that worships in a Norman-style 1895 stone church. Located on the Killington Flats, deep in a valley, the church has long ministered to the local community. These days, it is deeply involved in reaching out to those affected by the flooding caused by Irene. Some of the worst flooding happened here, as attested to in this photo:

(The pickup still is nose down in the pavement.)

In any event, Church of Our Saviour has historic connections with Holy Cross and some of the priests who have lived there have kept to the Benedictine way of life, labour is prayer. The church has had a working farm off and on and now there is a resident baker (who makes excellent fruit tarts which are sold at Monastery Greetings), who also is the church organist and maintains a Benedictine pattern of life. The church is always open for the way-farer and since the mid-1990s has revived its guest house ministry. There are now walking trails up above the church in the hills to enhance the sojourner's time.

So it is in this context that some of Kirstin's ashes will be interred. The apple trees had a good crop this year. Her life will become part of Our Saviour's.

Meanwhile, I keep vigil, placing the sachet by the 1000 peace crane arrangement that Kirstin received from her cat-sitter a year ago. Kirstin's laughter, stability, clarity and commitment to God and God's creation help me maintain steadiness and hope in this incredibly stressful time in my life.

'I believe in the Communion of Saints....' Don't know how else I could make it.

We SO do not need this

HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BURLINGTON VT
502 AM EDT THU SEP 29 2011

THIS HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK IS FOR NORTHERN NEW YORK…CENTRAL VERMONT…NORTHEAST VERMONT…NORTHWEST VERMONT AND SOUTHERN VERMONT.

.DAY ONE…TODAY AND TONIGHT.

OCCASIONAL SHOWERS WITH AN EMBEDDED THUNDERSTORMS WILL BE POSSIBLE TODAY ACROSS THE NORTH COUNTRY. THESE SHOWERS WILL BE CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOCALIZED AREAS OF HEAVY RAINFALL…ESPECIALLY ACROSS THE HIGHER TERRAIN OF THE ADIRONDACKS OF NEW YORK AND GREEN MOUNTAINS OF CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN VERMONT. LOCALIZED RAINFALL AMOUNTS OF 1 TO 2 INCHES WILL POSSIBLE…WHICH MAY CAUSE RISES ON STREAMS AND RIVERS BY TONIGHT.

.DAYS TWO THROUGH SEVEN…FRIDAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY.

A DEVELOPING COASTAL LOW PRESSURE OVER THE WEEKEND WILL HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO PRODUCE ANOTHER MODERATE TO HEAVY RAINFALL EVENT ACROSS THE NORTH COUNTRY. AN ADDITIONAL 1 TO 2 INCHES OF RAINFALL WILL BE POSSIBLE BY MONDAY…WHICH WILL CAUSE RISES ON AREA STREAMS AND RIVERS.

FURTHERMORE…ENOUGH COLD AIR ACROSS THE HIGHER TERRAIN OF THE ADIRONDACK MOUNTAINS IN NORTHERN NEW YORK AND PARTS OF THE GREEN MOUNTAINS IN VERMONT…MAY SUPPORT SOME WET SNOW. A FEW INCHES OF SNOW ACCUMULATION WILL BE POSSIBLE BY MONDAY ABOVE 2000 FEET.

Just in case you think Vermont is quiet

From Vermont Today:

LINCOLN — Vermont State Police say an armed man involved in a car crash tried to get away in a fire truck that responded to the accident, and his dog bit a trooper.
Police say 30-year-old Trevor Burton of Warren was a passenger in Wednesday’s car crash in Lincoln. They say he got into the fire truck with his pit bull terrier and threatened to drive off, but firefighters talked him out of it.

Police say Burton handed the magazine to his handgun to a trooper and left the truck, but his dog bit the trooper’s finger.

Burton was charged with driving under the influence, operation without owner’s consent, and driving with a suspended license.

The car driver, 41-year-old Michael Farnolo of Warren, was charged with leaving the scene of a collision.

Five years...

of blogging and in the past two, my efforts here have greatly fallen off... partly because of wasting so much time on Facebook, partly because of having a more demanding job, partly because of a general state of being distracted.

Four years ago I hiked up Hunger Mountain on a gorgeous September afternoon and came home to take the plunge and create this blog. I miss that hike. We only got out one night this summer. What a change from last year of tromping 166 miles on the Long Trail.

But life being what it is, we don't always get to do the things we want to do.

And once again, my life will be in total upheaval this winter as I leave Trinity and hunt for another congregation somewhere, somehow... that all means packing up again (haven't unpacked everything wondering if I was going to have to move; it was a premonition... I don't have everything to pack up because I lost a good chunk of it in 2009 when the cellar flooded), and more so, trying to figure out where to live in between calls. It is almost hopeless trying to find rentals on the web because in this neck of the woods, all one can dredge up are vacation rentals where the website only allows plugging in $750/week. You've got to be kidding. I am thinking more in terms of $750/month. (Dream on.)

Meanwhile, I think of those who have totally lost their homes in the wake of Irene three weeks ago. Our state of Vermont looks very different now and our streams and rivers have carved out new beds. We'll adapt, once we get through our loss.

So shall I.

Oh, the heartbreak

Farmers have such a special relationship with their animals... from an article about how Vermont farmers have suffered from Irene:

It was while the rescue boat was ferrying the Severances to safety that they saw some of the cows from the pasture floating down the White River.

Some made it alive a few miles down the river, Buddy said.

“People were calling — they said they heard cows in the river bawling, just going down through,” he said. “We know that they made it at least that far alive. I would have rather seen them, at least the ones that did go down the river, I would have rather watched them drown than have them go that far and suffer.”