The good news is: I still have a lot to learn.

Hey Siri!

We met some time ago. I had to train myself not to say please and thank you, even though you were trained to say, you're welcome.

"Are you a Republican or a Democrat?" I asked, hoping to surprise my grandfather with how clever I was. I can look back now and realize the social media of the day, black and white television, was full of news and discussion around the upcoming presidential election of 1964.

Inspiration for this post comes from the aspiration expressed by Bob Sternfels, McKinsey and Company's Global Managing partner since 2021.

Our neighbor, Skip, took it upon himself to plow out our driveway at 5:30 am on the morning of our first snow accumulation this year.

It's a long story that starts with our neighborhood mailboxes being out on the side of a state highway across the road from our neighborhood. Because of the low population density, we have USPS Rural Route delivery, which means our neighborhood mail comes to a mailbox cluster rather than to our houses.

One of you this week, emailed to point out I appeared to be more judgmental of Robert Frost's narrator in Mending Wall than of the narrator's neighbor. The reader's observation on this one allows me to understand I put the burden on the cultural misalignment on Frost over his neighbor. I feel okay with that because Frost wrote the account, and was the one who moved next to his neighbor rather than the other way around, and thereby imposes his outsider point of view on the situation.

Sugaring season in Vermont officially starts on the first Tuesday in March, which is also Town Meeting Day. Sugaring here means maple sugar -- sugar being the word for the sweet sap that can be drawn out of a maple tree at the very beginning of spring when the maple tree draws the carbohydrates stored in its roots once the temperatures consistently rise to above freezing during the day.

Allen is a multigenerational Vermonter. Well, in my eyes he is. His parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were born here and all lived in our small town. Well, in my eyes it's our town. He and my son met when they were both six-years old. By that time, my son had been born in Boston, lived in LA for five years, and had just arrived with his parents to the small Vermont village where Allen lived in a house his parents' built on family-owned land.

A couple of summers ago, I went to an outdoor dinner and concert in our small town. The setting overlooked a watery meadow where the West River flows out of the Vermont mountains and joins the Connecticut River on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. The felicity of the geography has made it a meeting, gathering place, and trading center for millennia. The short growing season and otherwise hilly terrain has kept it small, though nonetheless useful.