… today, except it’s not.
So much for those days jammed into town halls and school gymnasiums, debating school consolidations or upping appropriations to local food shelves. So much for buying a bowl of chili for lunch and supporting the local PTO. Stand up and vote by voice has been replaced this year by the ubiquitous paper ballot all over the state.
All night, the wind blows — March’s mighty lion. I wake thinking of the old farmhouse and broken down barn I visited the day before. Someone I knew years ago has bought the property and intends to build a new house. The farmhouse lies along a mountain ridge, with a view into a valley. Far up the valley, wind towers sparkled in the sunlight.
There’s no one around at this house, just the sun and myself, snowbanks sculpted by the wind far higher than my head. I might as well be on the edge of the world. I walk back up that long driveway, the snow drifted nearly to my knees. At the crest, I turn again and look back, curious to see next summer how this property will return to life.
Stony Soil Vermont 
I hope the reclaiming of the property is done thoughtfully. When nature provides a beautiful landscape, it deserves a house that does not complicate the view.
The zoom meetings were definitely not the same. Even though we’ve had Australian ballot for years, we always had the in-person meeting. Such a hole in the tradition this year.
Awesome photo! XO
We had a very sparsely attended in-person informational meeting, and a sparsely attended day voting. It seemed like there was none of the usual energy that says town meeting day, spring is here!
If you don’t look too hard, you can see a llama head in that cloud formation 🙃. (Or maybe my eyes are just really tired!)
Yes, I can see the llama head too. Growing up, we’d lie on our backs in the grass and name what we saw in the clouds. I still do it sometimes. Thank you for calling attention to it — it opened the gate to a flood of good childhood memories!