Catch 3 to 5 instances of your making an instantaneous response to avoid a potential threat.

"100 years? All new people."

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

How wrong we often are about some life experience.

What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

"Meg, if I could make a system work, I wouldn't need a system." Meg Edwards was my former colleague from Landmark College.

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.