On Friday, Sept. 8, many in the area experienced an amazing thunderstorm - possibly one of the most intense lightning strikes that I can ever remember.
We have a very old, very large, disabled dog. Luke generally spends 23 hours a day asleep - he takes an occasional mosey to the brook to lie down in the cool water. He has severe arthritis and diabetes, and is almost blind and likely deaf, but he still likes his food, swims, and ear rubs.
He was lying down in his normal place on the entryway of the house we are building in Guilford. When the chaos after a massive lightning strike was over, Luke was gone.
We hunted every place we could imagine, but since his usual walking radius is under a quarter mile, that was our search range. After about 3.5 hours of searching behind every tree and log, in every ditch, in the pond, and through the construction site, we concluded that he must be dead.
Recently, I read a story about a family of four - granted, two were very young - who were so excited about all the money they were saving living in a tiny house. I read another story about a young man who had no cash, so he has tricked...
John Flores was the librarian at the Dover Free Library for 24 years. He has been a dedicated community servant, putting on creative and interesting programs and thoughtfully buying books locally whenever possible. In June, John was fired from the library with no cause. After 24 years, he was...
About 15 years ago, many of us bookstore owners wondered if we were still relevant. The behemoth Amazon was attempting to recreate the destruction of the record shop. Some independent booksellers even closed preemptively. Some stores actually joined in the e-book "revolution," trying to sell an alternative to the big bully's product, but Amazon retained a firm grip on e-books. I made up my mind early: we would not be a digital portal. We would be there for our community...
Every time we drive or bike on Route 30, the $27 million dollar pricetag for rebuilding a functional road shows off the state's priorities. Many commuters on Route 30 have expressed the sentiment that the road was perfectly adequate, as were the replaced guardrails. Cars rule. At the same moment, the state has decided that thousands of the poorest and least able Vermonters are to be tossed onto the curb like yesterday's trash. The lack of funding for emergency housing...
Just as the repaving of Route 9 in Brattleboro did not yield so much as an inch of bike lanes, now we have the state pouring huge amounts of money into Route 30: new guard rails, paving, etc. Where are the bike lanes? I was in the Burlington area this summer: beautiful bike lanes. I just drove on Route 9 in western Massachusetts: brand new bike lanes. Why is Brattleboro the last place in New England to have any bike...
On March 11, 12 years will have passed since the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex - a meltdown that happened as the result of a massive tsunami. The natural disaster should not have been surprising due to Japan's location within what geologists call the “Ring of Fire,” a powerful designation of the area around the Pacific Ocean where seismic activity is endemic - which makes the Pacific shoreline of Japan a very poor spot to build numerous...
The ongoing saga of George Santos feels like a complete rerun of the Trump show, highlighting another completely unqualified and morally bankrupt candidate who has become a face of the Republican Party. The most interesting part of the Santos saga is not the abject failure of the Democratic Party to vet this scoundrel, not the inability of the local Republicans to see through his sorry tale, but the fact that he has succeeded in being seated and will probably remain...