We took a day trip up to South Hero to visit family yesterday. The colors along 91 and 89 on a clear morning have peaked and I think have caught most leaf peepers from away off guard. I say this because on this foliage weekend, the roads don't seem like an amusement park ride with sudden slow downs and death defying swerves. I love traveling on the interstate for the same reasons that I love looking over farm fields or standing in a clearing atop a hill. Having lived in places where we looked out over oceans, valleys, mountains and wide open spaces, it took some readjustment to settle back down among the trees in the CT River Valley. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I am so fond of looking out over Lily Pond here in Vernon and standing recess duty at the school where I can look across the farm field towards the town hall and beyond to the hills.
I noticed that the geese are starting to move in the Champlain Valley and expect their travels will lead them here soon, if not for the shorter days than because the lake is so low that land has emerged from the cover of lake waters. The egrets, ducks, cormorants, and geese are congregated in the shallows, swimming among dozens of duck blinds and when we arrived at my mother's, her suitcase was open on her couch with her house plants in bags waiting for me to bring them to my house until May. Wayne hoisted a huge pumpkin from the trunk and set it in her front garden and upon seeing it mom said, "When I leave I will give it to Claire." Once again I am out of sync with those that are unsettled this time of year.
My sister and brother in law had escaped to the Northeast Kingdom in the morning for a hike and in the afternoon showed us that the docks were out as they reviewed with us the many projects they had completed and those still ahead of them before they too travel south. I find myself conflicted, envious of their summers at my "grandparent's camp" on the lake, and yet relieved that we don't have the constant work and activity that living on a lake entails.
In one sense, my family up north is living on an interstate where things are exciting and loaded with open opportunities; but in another, it doesn't escape me that they spend a day each week hiking and biking in slower parts of the state in order to get away from their responsibilities. Perhaps Wayne and I are much to settled for where we are in life. With our children spread out from Maine, to New York to California, it would make sense after Wayne retires, to hit the open road; and yet for now, our plans are to walk the trails in the town forest. A wise man once explained to me, that he had grown up on a farm in Vernon, went away to college and started his family only to realize that everything that he was working so hard for was back on that Vernon farm. I guess that it suits some to race up the interstate where the fall colors are a blur and others like myself are content to examine each colored leaf as we meander past. -Norma Manning
