Martha Molnar

I enjoy riding trains so much I even look forward to substandard dining while staring out the big windows, because the trip along the widening Hudson is as beautiful - and as slow - as the river itself.

“Sorry I didn’t call back,” I was telling a Manhattan friend. “I spent the whole day at the Fermentation Festival at Green Mountain College.”

The hummingbirds are leaving soon. I can tell from the way they fight over the feeder, as fiercely as when they first arrived, famished from their two-thousand-mile journey north. No sharing or taking turns for these birds, ever. Now, eager to bulk up before returning south, they dive bomb and try to bodyslam intruders in midair, the violence mounting as September advances.

We’ve all heard that the Inuit have more than fifty words for snow. The Sami in northern Scandinavia are said to have a thousand words for reindeer. In Greek and Russian there are two or three words for blue corresponding to different shades, which are perceived as separate.

But in English we have a woefully inadequate vocabulary for green.

Bill McKibben, Vermont’s leading climate change activist, was speaking at Green Mountain College. “We have won the argument,” he was saying. “Now we have to win the war.“

Last year, remembering the previous very long winter, my husband and I decided to finally take a long anticipated trip to Europe. Winter there would be milder, and in any case, there would be plenty to see indoors.

They say heating with wood warms you three times: while cutting, then stacking, and finally burning the logs. So we thought we’d save on labor – and the environmental impact of burning wood – by installing solar panels. But while these may function without human labor in California, in snowy Vermont, they warm us at least twice.

Each year before the winter solstice, I start thinking about just how smart those ancient pagans must have been. The Druids, the Romans, the Chinese and others knew something we’ve forgotten: that’s it’s important to mark the winter solstice with something more than a passing mention on the news. The return of the light deserves nothing less than major celebration, and most of the religions and societies on earth have done just that.

Our house has become a battleground. The two of us against the invading flies, worms, wooly bear caterpillars, and spiders that each fall colonize it for their own comfortable survival through the coming winter.
 

I once read a book called Watchers at the Pond by Franklin Russell. The author lived alone in a primitive cabin for a whole year observing a New England pond. His book is detailed and fascinating, his discipline admirable.
 

Having not much time and even less discipline, I decided to repeat the experiment in a single day. I would try to spend it silently observing life at the pond - without books, phone (except one stashed away for emergencies), camera, or even a watch to distract.

On the front page of the Rutland Herald, I recently learned that Castleton is the ninth most educated town in the country, and the most educated in the state, beating out Middlebury and Burlington, as well as Hanover in New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

This coming Saturday Castleton will host its 76th Colonial Day House Tour. That’s three generations of women organizers and community members involved in this popular annual event.
 

Coordinated by the Castleton Woman’s Club, it lasts just six hours, from 10 to 4, but takes months of preparation. More than a dozen private homes and public buildings are on the tour, featuring a variety of architectural styles including Colonial Revival, Federal, Greek Revival, Queen Anne and Gothic Revival.

We moved to Vermont at the end of June six years ago and enjoyed every hour of the sublime summer, followed by a glorious fall and a very long white winter. After that, it was no longer beautiful. It was, in fact, devoid of any hint of loveliness – unless one was a newt whose future was tied to mud.

I had heard plenty about Vermont’s infamous mud season. But I had no clear understanding of just how long a drippy day can be, not to mention a week of such days. Nor of what it’s like driving on a dirt road that in mud season demanded skills I didn’t possess.