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]