Category Archives: Vermont

Halloween, Pagans, and Religion in General

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I know some readers ran from the building upon seeing the word religion, above. And I know it should not be discussed in polite company. But I further know that many readers – and nutters I call friends – would not consider themselves polite company. 

Ah, Halloween! A magical holiday where I grew up, a place then not as rural as Vermont, yet not the overdeveloped bastion of privilege that it sadly became. Back then, it was a lot of houses made by dads and uncles moving their families to “the country” from the Bronx and such. A lot of woods. And a heck of a lot of childhood mischief, especially on Halloween.

I recall like yesterday the thrill as we crunched through (mostly oak?) leaves in inventive costumes, dragging wands, too-long skirts, broomsticks and giant satchels, delighting in autumnal smells. The real excitement began once we were old enough to go out without parental supervision. It was invigorating as hell. Our antennae (lit. and fig.) were on high alert. We had minimal street lighting. No halogens. Dark! There was a palpable sense of danger in the air. Little to do with honoring the dead or saints on All Hallows’ Eve, or the possibly pagan roots thereof.

Melissa Kirsch suggested in the NYT that we all try not knowing everything in advance. Not spending hours comparing products before buying. Not researching the heck out of each place before going there.  Letting an adventure unfold, and inspire wonder. Doing an unscheduled, impromptu, playful thing. 

This holiday was that. We had no master plan for maximum treatage. We weren’t greedy. We were just roaming in the dark, tittering, wondering what was around every bush, house, and corner. The older kids were generally menacing on any given day. What might they do to us on this day? Attack? Plunder our treat haul? Anything but that!  

Raised Episcopalian, to my Catholic grandmother’s dismay, I later became a bit of a pagan in the original sense (not as in the polytheistic belief in multiple gods, but as in the Latin pagani: people who lived rurally, thus considered ignorant). I’m happily, rurally ignorant. Due to unexplainable events and crazy coincidences I experienced, over time I came to believe in energies and nature spirits, certainly ghosts, and in celebrating the change of seasons. Which might make me Wiccan. A modern pagan.

Dear Reader may find that nuts, but what sissy writes about religion without stating where she stands? I’m not too worried what people think of me. I go to a great church. I also believe that trees have a kind of consciousness (which has been scientifically examined), as does everything in nature. We should honor nature. We should cheer it on. I feel it would respond in kind. More oxygen. Cooling temps. Fewer storms. 

Is this paganism? Wicca? A heretical blending of “true” religion with fanciful notions? Does it matter what it’s called? I just call it energetic. Have you never nursed something or someone back to health by your own seeming sheer force of will, with or without prayer mixed in? Thoughts and desires carry energy.

As for the earth’s widely accepted Abrahamic religions, and any other I’ve read about, I find some of it silly – including in my own Christianity, which I very much enjoy right along with my less conventional beliefs. Still, I think the world would be a lot happier if more people regularly practiced some form of religion (spirituality?) without judging the others. It has been proven that people who live in groups are happiest. And I can tell you for sure that people who gather in groups to give thanks, to commune, to do good works, and sing maybe, and pray for each other and our planet, and to celebrate together, absolutely get a happiness and a peace from it. I doubt most people attend services these days because they’re afraid of eternal damnation. They go because they feel good there. Hopeful. Valued. Useful.

I’ve been in mosques, Russian Orthodox churches, JW meetings, Jewish temples and Chabad Houses, weddings of all stripes, Buddhist funerals, a Catholic Easter in Rome … and honestly, they all felt spiritual, holy, life-affirming. I’m not keen on those run solely by men (still?!?), but no one forced me to attend.

Many don’t believe in any God at all, regarding earthly suffering as proof that no loving being is In Charge. I’ve waivered myself, and understand. I don’t believe in predestination or fate; I do believe in free will and in luck — including bad luck. I don’t believe in a punishment/reward-based karma, but did when younger, and I do believe in multiple lifetimes. Is there truly no divine being of any kind? The universe is too magnificent, with too many synchronicities, for there not to be something larger than ourselves at play, way I see it.

I get your God, if it’s love-based. What I don’t get, as perhaps Dear Reader does not, is why so many consider their religion superior — in fact, the only valid one. If that were the case, you’d have to be born in a certain place to certain parents to be lucky enough not to burn in the fires of Hell (or whatever) for eternity (or whatever). To wit: all the poor slobs who weren’t born like you were just born damned. And should be punished or enslaved, in life or in death? I’m not buying it. 

Surely all religions, when not misinterpreted by maniacs with agendas, basically lead to the same place. Be kind. Stand for what’s right. Make amends. Help others, including strangers. Respect however our planet’s beauty was created; steward its health. Do good works. Spread love.

Ideas
• Try taking time off weekly, a secular sabbath of sorts, to appreciate things. I’m awed when something nice, even a cloud formation, is delivered unto me. I thank the Forces almost daily for something, however small, because my belief is that there’s no way this whole show is running itself. I think we’re co-running it with some benevolent spirit or spirits, and if we’d just quit screwing things up on our end, everything would get a lot nicer real fast. 

• If you can’t do, CHEER ON. Can’t run or perform? Go see a footrace or a play or a concert. Participants are boosted like a rocket when spectators are rooting for them! Feel the energy travel around the participants and spectators. It’s magical. My niece said that a dog got so excited as she ardently cheered on 5K runners that he “piddled.” Feel the love. Good day.

Ann Aikens is an author, columnist, speaker, and blogger. Her darkly comical book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, was published in 2023, her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find bookshops at annaikens.com; blog:  uppervalleygirl.com.

Change of Seasons, Change of Heart, Change

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At the end of an idyllic college reunion weekend, a friend said three words as we watched a classmate loading his car become morose. “Transitions are hard,” she whispered.

Truer words never spoken. I wish someone had said them to me decades ago. 

Because emotions are more dealable when you know why you’re feeling them. Such as: “I’m despondent because I’m going through a transition.” Not: “I’m overreacting.” Or “I’m losing my mind for no apparent reason.” At reunion, it was this: “I had the best time this weekend. I love my funny, smart college friends. Now I have to go home.”

Transitioning seasons is a hard one for many. Some lament the end of summer, particularly the gardeners and the sun- and water- lovers. Myself, I welcome fall. Summer drags on too long for me. When the sun shines, we feel obligated to make hay. When we have a summer with little rain, that’s a lot of haymaking. Read: outdoorsy work, socializing, exercising. There’s not much time to … reflect. It feels to me like a lot of “racing around,” as my mother would put it.

Fall’s shorter days heighten our more introspective inclinations, for good or bad. I savor the colors and the smells of autumn (if not the Leafer traffic), the harvest, the stews, the cooler temps, the colder waters. Stick season delights me, while it sends others spiraling downwards.  A few weeks ago was monarch butterfly season. Then, termite season. Now: wasps-looking-to get-in-the-house season. Some geese already heading south. Boom boom boom, one after the other. Change. 

The longer you live, more change. With each season, an anniversary: we remember something – or someone – now gone. Family and friends who have died. The houses loved, with so many memories, sold. My pal I used to take to the summer fried clam shacks or the fall apple festivals now unable to leave his residence! Nieces and nephews I rarely see! Who, when small, had inventive costumes for Halloween. (One Halloween the youngest declared she would be: “a marshmallow on a stick”. And she was). Little them, all running up and down streets for tricks and treats. I’m terribly nostalgic for those times. I am gladdened when anyone says they miss when their kids were young. Then I’m not alone.

I asked a college friend, what change was hard about becoming an empty nester? Was it that the house grew quiet, that you missed your daughter’s presence, that three was now two? He said, “All of it … and just … where did 20 years go?”

There’s that – the growing up of the youth below us – sometimes as the people above us, who took care of us, now need caretaking. And when the once-capable parents die, as a sage friend put it, “It’s like losing a roof over your head that you never even knew was there.” Heck, it’s hard enough for me when friends move away. 

Nostalgia is an odd thing, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” The American Heritage Dictionary takes it one further: “Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness.” Yipes! I hope I don’t have the fatal kind. I do hate change. Except for a change of heart. That I like.

I think we’re born with a degree of nostalgia, and life circumstances make it grow more for some people.  Some of us are barely nostalgic at all (I envy you), and some are what I call “nostalgia monsters.” A scientist might call us “superstalgics”. 

A niece and I are both that. We’ll talk about things we miss, and bawl. When I suggested that we are both nostalgia monsters, she said, “I’m so nostalgic that once I rearranged my room and immediately cried because I missed the way it ‘used to be’ an hour earlier.” (One advantage to kids’ growing up: their self-awareness and humor become more sophisticated.)

I’m not sure what function nostalgia serves. It’s mostly just painful. Perhaps, in the way spiritual and artistic and carpentry gatherings connect people within a community, nostalgia connects time within ourselves. It connects our present to our past in a mostly good way. There might be some biological survival-of-the-species value in this. I don’t know. All I know is I couldn’t bear saying goodbye to my elementary school teachers at year-end and I haven’t changed a bit.

It doesn’t matter how logically superstalgics think. We can’t embrace change when our heart is throbbing with sorrow.

Back to fall. Stick season was at one time, for me, a harbinger of the noisy, wonderful family gatherings of Thanksgiving. But my family doesn’t have those any more. My mommy was the center of them, as a mother so often is. Maybe, with age, you have less to look forward to in general. For yourself. You can be happy for the pivotal events in the lives of those younger, but for you, not that much is happening. Maybe you can’t get off work for holidays, or traveling has become difficult. Maybe money is tight, and you can’t visit your people. I get it all.

So if you wax gloomy as the leaves fall, I feel your pain. I won’t say, “Let us embrace change!” any more than I’d say, “Let us wrap barbed wire around hot dogs and eat them!” But I for one can and must distract myself from nostalgia. “Life is for the living,” my sage friend says. 

I yank myself into the present. I help others as able, attend the New World Festival, the Tunbridge Fair, the Morrill Homestead Apple and Cheese Festival, consider crafting holiday gifts. I ponder the Covid-19 test called BinaxNOW and wonder if the NOW indicates urgency, or if it’s an acronym (No Organisms Within?), and whether NOW should be applied to other products, such as TortillasNOW, Old SpiceNOW, or – definitely – ImmodiumNOW. Needs an exclamation point. Good day.

Ann Aikens is an author, columnist, speaker, and blogger. Her darkly comical book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, was published in 2023, her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find bookshops at annaikens.com; her blog is uppervalleygirl.com.

Prize-winning entry in the Children’s Decorated Vegetables at the Tunbridge World’s Fair

How To Find Relief in the Face of Certain Misery

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THINK OF THE TICKS!

Given the increasingly maddening state of global affairs, the New Climate rollercoaster, plus whatever you’re going through personally, I imagine that Dear Reader is somewhat terrified. Or, at the least, dismayed. Bewildered?

I get it, and offer here some tips. My own life a basketful of paralyzing worries on a daily basis, I’ve had to actively endeavor not to go crackers. So I consider myself, if sadly, an expert at digging myself out of the hole. Here’s this. Hope it not silly pablum, but something of use.

Help where you can. Then: There are so many terrible things happening on earth — all being reported in exquisite detail — we simply must turn down the volume. Decide against reading past a panic-inducing headline even if it kills you. Turn off some alerts – or people. Turn off your notifications and tune in to Tight Pants Dance Party on Pandora (Pandora’s free, if you can stand the occasional ads) and go scrub the bathtub. Then get in?

Ah yes, real physical exercise, as much as you can muster. That and getting in water just kick the stuffing out of anxiety. You’ll sleep better. What, you’re not getting good sleep? Haha! Who is? I want to meet these people. What is their secret? Oh wait, they lack empathy. Goody for them.

When this world is alarming, check out and go to other worlds. If you can afford it, travel. Meditation (always free on the excellent Insight Timer app), contemplative prayer, lovely scenery set to music on Youtube (a superb use of drones), napping, forest bathing, earthing, swimming, reading spiritual books or those with happy endings…I’m doing all those things, plus watching pro tennis (I enjoy the inaudible muttering) and — of course — the Olympics. You have your own jones.  Fishing? Boating? Zip-lining? Drive-in movies? Go! Other worlds, I tell you.

Subscribe to good news. Thankfully, there is in fact good news out there. See a list of IG recommendations at the end of this column.

Dear Reader may have a physical situation exacerbating your outlook. Who needs that? Low thyroid, blood sugar, and hormonal issues can wreak havoc. See a doctor or alternative medicine practitioner recommended by someone you actually know. Try something new, like reiki, EMDR, hypnotism – could intrigue and boost. At the least, distract!

Laugh out loud. I saw a book at the annual Barnard Fire & Rescue tag sale, Bread Machine Magic. Others laughed heartily at their own finds. Mere laughter makes others laugh.

Make music or art. Dust off that accordion or your vocal cords … get craft supplies at your local purveyor … take a class … and steep yourself in sane-making pleasures.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. A kind friend recently said I was too hard on myself. My unspoken reaction was, “Our parents were hard on us, so that makes sense.” The last thing you need when things are difficult is you being your own adversary.

Spend some money, by crikey. We’ve all become so tight-fisted that I think it’s making us contract physically and spiritually. Eat out! Get something you’ve badly needed for months or years (yes, the price went up, and it’s not going down). Or just some frippery that elevates you. Buy a gift for someone worse off than you. And I don’t mean on the Amazon. Post-COVID Burl, post-flood Montpelier, and your very own town can use the biz — and uplift. Watch the proprietor’s face light right up. Customers! By buying something, you’re gifting to your friend or self an object or service, and the gifts of cheer and hope to the seller. The world could use a whole lot more of those. Money talks. Hello, it says, I’m here for the trading.

As promised: Hot Instagram tips from lifelong friend COL.

The Dogist: He goes around NYC taking photos of people’s dogs, talking briefly to the owners.

Outta Puff Daddys: Middle-aged British dudes who formed a little dance company; it morphed into advocating for men’s mental health. So dear.

Funkanometry: Two young Canadian guys who do hip-hop type dance to all different kinds of music.

This chick named Jen I couldn’t find, who post things positive every day, as she says at the end, apparently.

Dan Harris: Anchorman had a panic attack on TV, then wrote the bestseller Ten Percent Happier… like a Buddhist Zen for current times. No candy coating. He gives little snippets and then ends little each one with: “Inner peace, m—–f—–‘s“

The self-help people: Mel Robbins, Jay Shetty, many others.

The dancing and art ones. Just search.

The PS22 Chorus! Not-privileged fifth graders in NYC public school. They sing with total heart and a young, funny, energetic leader. I dare you not to cry.

Nathan Clark Wildlife… He had the coolest photos and videos of a little owl family at the top of a dead tree.

Soul Seeds for All: Uplifting nuggets. Break out the Kleenex.

Surely something up there is your bag? By all means send me your own faves. Regardless: Don’t go down without a fight! Take steps to feel UP! Then spread the wealth, as able. Good day.

Ann Aikens is an author, columnist, speaker, and blogger. Her darkly comical book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, was published in 2023, her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. See ww.uppervalleygirl.com and www.annaikens.com.

The Magic of the J

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The NBC bloom, once it get serious, curls upward into a letter “J.” Shades of the Monarch butterfly caterpillar once that is hanging upside down and readying to spin its cocoon. It also becomes a J.

Must be something about the letter J, as there are other cool things in nature like the Chambered Nautilus’ golden spiral,  a sea creature in the same class as the octopus.

If you know of another J, by all means report in as able.

The NBC Always Surprises

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The Night Blooming Cereus is ever mystical. Today I opened my window, and found this bud… way earlier than usual. Had no idea it was coming.

Then I moved some of my crap to better photograph her and found this down below:

For God’s sake, this bud is well on its way! Plus, I’ve never had more than 1 bud at one time in all these years. So…we’ll see what happens. Buds fall off. This big baby got jostled BAD the last few days as I didn’t even know it was there. I give it…a week till show time?

An Independence Day miracle, children! Will report in as able.

One More Day of Free eBooks OH BOY

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/C20pswbPvY-/

“Buy” eBook on the Amazon for $0.00 ~ decide if you’d like to gift a copy to a graduate? (Not the “free Kindle book.”) You need no eReader to read free ebook on your device!

Sign up for my email list at http://www.annaikens.com and WIN A PRIZE. HOT NEWS coming soon. Mention Speedy Spoo for extra credit/favoritism.

How to Get Your Mind Blown

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Oshe Bunny has been a lot of places, but in the path of Totality viewing was one of his top faves of all time. Because his eyeballs are glass, he was able to sneak a peek beneath his safety goggles. Because he is sentient, he wept uncontrollably when the mind-blowing corona appeared.

He was lucky enough to have fantastic Eclipse hosts in Burlington, lakeside. He cheered and bawled and cheered, and had a lot of local beezers and gluten-free, vegan Bitchin’ Sauce.

Snow, Mud, and Taking the Good with the Bad

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So much happs, Dear Reader, where to start? 

With snow of course. This week’s unexpected dumping was the usual: exciting, beautiful, good for some, bad for others, a source of pre-storm grocery store pandemonium, and a ton of work. Those that made it to the Maple Open House Weekend during the prior storm had a gas. People got there by foot, snowshoe, truck, or with snow tires still on their car. Yo, don’t try to keep us from our maple, Mother Nature.

A local plowing guy casually tossed off, in passing, how his rig had gone sliding sideways down a road, with him at the wheel. This reminded me of when snowboarding was brand new. My friend Harry and I were on skis at Okemo and a posse of young snowboarders flew around and past us, wicked close, like paparazzi. One ran over my skis. “Sorry,” he murmured. Harry said, “Ann, I just saw your whole life flash before my eyes.”

So I asked the plow guy if his life had flashed before his eyes. He replied, “No. I spend a lot of time in this truck. I pretty much know what it can do.” And if that’s not a Vermonty sentiment, I don’t know what is.

Because I got snowed in with shoveling to do, I had time to question the usefulness of my sad old bod, which used to shovel snow like a human windmill. Those days are gone, alas. Aging in Vermont is not easy. But then, living here offers basically a free gym membership, so there’s that.  We take the good with the bad.

Post-storm sun on the sparkling blanket of white cheers us greatly. Articles in The Atlantic and elsewhere are asking why everyone seems so down lately, when statistics are solid in the US in terms of unemployment, the stock market, interest rates, and many changes under way for the general good. One answer is that we’re all unaware of how badly COVID affected us. And as a local merchant put it, “There seems to be a general sense of malaise. I’m not young and I feel like I lost two years of my life to COVID. Plus, people started treating each other badly before that whole mess, and haven’t reverted back to good manners.” 

I couldn’t agree more. My grandparents would be appalled at the way people speak to workers in stores and restaurants, to customer service on the phone, to their neighbors, teachers, employees, bosses—you name it. 

A friend blamed social media, calling it “antisocial media.” Which is a disgrace. At times it’s like a virtual boxing ring with people slugging away at each other to no good end. Why? Why bother? Do you think the person you’re pounding is going to change their mind? Spit a tooth out and go, “Wait, Carol. By God, you’re right!” Do you think the like-minded spectators hanging onto the ropes, cheering you on, will think highly of you for more than the 4 seconds it takes to read your assault? I don’t get it, man.

Because I wrote a book, I have no choice but to be on Social. I just took a reprieve for a month – bliss! Back in it while snowed in, I found “doom scrolling” an utter chore. 

Except for … the reasons people went into there in the first place: video of a backcountry skier wearing a GoPro who happens upon a lone snowboarder literally buried alive, and frantically digs him out. What are the odds?! A monkey hears a trapped kitten’s cries and does its damnedest to rescue it from a drainpipe. Then lovingly grooms and hugs it! Interspecies love in all its forms: delicious. 

It’s ironic to me that a skier saves the life of a snowboarder and animals of all kinds care for each other on the same page as one Facebooker hammers away another (lit. or fig.). I guess we just have to, again, take the good with the bad.

There are at least four good reasons, in addition to The New Rudeness, why people are down. But if I list them, they will only distress Dear Reader. You know them anyway. They are why I avoid the news, beyond startling headlines that materialize on my phone. I’d much rather read Ski Chatter online and learn hilarious lingo, such as “beaver balls” and “death cookies.” I’d rather laugh than cry — or fight. Wouldn’t you? The Interweb: good and bad.

Shortly, Mud Season (“Mud VI”) kicks in anew. Just hoping everyone can make it to maple shacks and the other treasures that are the Good of mud season. I remain hopeful. As well might you? Good (with the bad) day.

Another Snow Oddity

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You’ll never guess what this is, so I’ll just tell you.

Years ago, a neighbor kid was practicing casting his fishing rod out in the yard. The fishing hook got caught way up, in a dead tree branch. He got his line free by yanking hard enough to break the brittle branch. Since, a little piece of that broken branch has hung from a piece of fishing line attached to a higher branch.

I do not understand the dynamics of what happened. But I do welcome unsolved mysteries in nature. Whenever I see the broken branch twirling on the invisible fishing line, seemingly hovering in the air, it cracks me up. It really cracked me up after yesterday’s storm — the snow piled high upon it, the fishing line invisible as always. I may be the only person who knows it exists. I’m definitely the one that appreciates it most.

My Favorite Easter (Spring?) Decoration Ever

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Would you call it a centerpiece? I do precious little entertaining at home.

I didn’t make it. People who know how to entertain did. The vase is 1″ high.