Autumn Snow, Shannon Albritton, all rights reserved, 2011
It’s a quintessential Vermont day, and we’re all trying to hold onto the last breaths of autumn before the big snow. The vendors at the farmers market are shivering, but they’re also grinning. The market closes today–for the season. No more waking at dawn to make egg rolls or harvest vegetables. They’ve shown up for us for the past 6 months, and now they’ll pack it up until spring comes round again.
Like a party crasher–with guests–snow is the forecast, and not just flurries. A foot. Facebook posts prematurely turn toward woodstoves and woolens, muffins and hot soup. The bloggers are stirring too. Three neighbors post at once. Jodi, about our road. Shannon, about the weather. Kevin, about… taking a dump.
To tell the truth, I’m not sure what Kevin’s post is about, and I’m not even sure I’m supposed to blow his cover. This is the first that Nature Man has “blogged” if I’m not mistaken. Mostly, he just spouts. Vitriol. Like this:
I was takin a dump the other morning while the wife had the National Pompous Radio on in the kitchen. I know, I should have got up and shut the door to the shitter, but I was mid-turd, so I had to sit there listening to them blather. They were interviewing some fellow who was a leader of something called the Tea Party. He was talkin all tough about cutting taxes and job creators and Cripes knows what else, and all I’m thinkin is, buddy, you named your group after something my daughter does with a stuffed bear and a headless Barbie doll.
Natureman suggests a KEG PARTY instead; which is where I need to be in 30 minutes. Actually it’s a cider-pressing, but there’s always beer. Do you think it’s still on? The white stuff has begun to fall.
After 18 years in these Green Mountains, summer is by far my favorite season; but when the snow comes around, like an old lover, it doesn’t matter how many times he’s been dumped, he stills turns me on.
Occupy Brattleboro, October 15, 2011, Kelly Salasin
On Saturday I joined the Occupy Movement in the comfort of my own town park in Brattleboro, Vermont. “What are we doing here?” my eleven-year old asked, “This isn’t Wall Street.”
I explained that this was our way of showing our support for what started in NYC. My son looked around the small park and noticed his school nurse, some younger classmates, and our neighbors from up the road. I introduced him to the midwife who assisted us with his older brother’s birth. “Helena came from across the state to be here,” I said, as she and I shared a sweet embrace.
Some of our South Pond friends were gathered too. Sparrow was there with her new baby, and Ted and his wife were there with their colleague from Nicaragua. Charlie and Kate told us that both of their sons, in different parts of the country, were gathering today. Students and teaching colleagues of my husband were also well represented.
“There are Occupy Movements in Rome and London this weekend as well,” he added.
“They’re happening over the world,” Kate echoed.
While we talked, young people led chants, while others of all ages stood by the road with signs. The thumbs up and solidarity honking was non-stop. People rolled down their windows to cheer. A local lawyer. Truck drivers. Teenagers. Old guys. BMW’s. Beaters. Delivery vans. NY plates, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts.
After an hour, my son walked into town to spend his pocket change, while my husband and I occupied a blanket apart from the crowd. A man from New Hampshire dropped down beside us, saying that he needed to soak up my “peace” vibe. I chuckled to myself, imagining an entire movement of people lying in the grass under the sun.
This guy had been in Boston for the rallies there, where it was much more intense, and he said that he preferred the energy here. After a few moments of silence, he was up again, off to talk with Health Care activists and 350-ers and some young men shouting about Ron Paul.
“If Ron Paul were running this country, those kids would never have gotten to this rally,” my husband said. “Our roads would still be missing.”
After 3 hours, I was ready to go. I wanted to get a bite to eat before the literary event with Ken Burns and David Blistein at the museum. There was no specific mention of Occupy Brattleboro at this large gathering, not even by the local organizer, but she did reference the fire and the floods and the murders. I appreciated that.
I also appreciated Ken’s message that we have to see ourselves in each other, that it’s our arrogance that makes us think that our views are uniquely right or that our times are special or that we are living our lives more fully than the generations before us. We each have our individual stories, he said; we each contain generosity and greed, sincerity and hypocrisy.
His friend David Blistein echoed these thoughts, saying that our righteousness prevented us from truly “feeling” our history, or seeing the other side. It doesn’t allow something new to happen, he said.
I couldn’t wait to get into the discussion during the Q& A, but there was more. David read from his new book, Real Time, with the voice of Harriet Tubman who had this to say to our self-absorbed generation:
At least those people knew they were slaves… (unlike the)people in the so-called ‘free’ world today. Because they plainly are not aware of their chains… Getting up at dawn to travel in a little metal box just so you can spend the whole day in another little box? That’s slavery. Having to look at the words on your computer before even saying hello to your children? That’s slavery. Sitting in front of your TV for hours at a time? That’s slavery. Thinking that the wealth in your bank account is more important than the wealth in your heart. That’s slavery. Living with a husband or wife whom you’ve forgotten how to love. That’s slavery.
It occurred to me that although “our times” seem so divided and alternately so “enlightened,” there is an arrogance in distinguishing ourselves from the past. It’s what Ken Burn’s calls, “the tyranny of the present.” But I didn’t whole-heartedly agree with either man’s view, and so when it was time, I shot my hand into the air.
“As a memoirist,” I said, “I do see the same history repeat itself in my family with the most uncanny details; But I’ve also seen it evolve. Each generation may pick up the same story, but they also make it a little better. I see the same evolution with Occupy Wall Street. They’ve created the space for something new to emerge–from the people.”
I could have wrestled these thoughts into the wee hours of the night with these two, but hundreds of people were ready to descend upon them, and I had a husband waiting across town with a glass of chardonnay and a late night burger.
It had been a good day in Brattleboro, made up of everything I love and admired about her. She had survived the fire, the murders, the floods and was still doing what she does best–engaging people in what matters to them.
It wasn’t just the Literary Festival, or the Occupation at Wells Fountain Park. It was the general hum of the town–among the staff behind the Co-op’s deli line or Amy’s bakery; in the arm chairs of the library; on the lawn of Brattleboro Savings and Loan with Fish from WKVT; at the newly restored Latchis with the broken marquee, still offering up opera and jazz; and down the street at the youth theater (NEYT) exploring homophobia with their latest play.
Past, present and future, the people in Brattleboro examine the chains, on all of us, and creatively endeavor to sing and read and gather to set us free.
(p.s. sometimes I think a little arrogance is in order to claim the change we want to see, especially if when its balanced by compassion and humility in the face of so much pain.)
Kelly Salasin, October 2011
The previous post on the Occupy Movement was: Occupy WHAT?
Although this is my designated week “unplugged,“ I’m making an exception to participate in the 5th Annual Blog Action Day. I’m proud to say that this is my third year joining bloggers around the world in posting about the same issue on the same day.
I was a brand new baby blogger the year I wrote about “Climate Change”–a steep topic for someone without a science brain; while last year’s focus on”Water” flowed more easily; and this year’s topic”Food” taps my roots–in Vermont.
I remember the first time I set foot in the Co-op. My doctor made me do it. I tentatively strolled down each unfamiliar aisle, past all the unfamiliar packaging–no Kellogs or Kraft or Keebler. Worst of all, some of the food had scary labels, saying: “organic.”
I skipped over those items.
Eventually, the Co-op became part of my shopping routine, and soon after, I became a member. Over the years, I watched as more and more items were labeled organic–and later “local”–and slowly it all began to make sense. In this way, the Co-op taught me about food and about the connection between my purchases and my health and the wellbeing of the land and the water and the air.
That journey began 17 years ago. I’ve had two sons since and they’ve grown up in the Co-op. They’ve helped stock shelves and served food at fairs and have organically learned about the relationship between what we eat and how we grow it and how that shapes the world around us.
It was my cousin out in California who brought it all together for me. She told me that her water was polluted because of all the pesticides used on grapes, and after that “organic” became personal. Each time I picked up a bottle of wine, I thought about Deborah, and how my choice, 3,000 miles away, affected her life in such a vital way.
On the day after Irene assaulted Vermont, the word on the road was that we could be without power for up to a month. When we saw what the flood did to Route 9 (the main highway across our state) we didn’t doubt it.
My husband and I began talking about leaving. “Maybe we should head down to family in New Jersey,” he said.
But of course, we had jobs; and the kids had school–maybe; and we wanted to be in town to help when there was someway to get to the others who had been harder hit than us.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we were stuck like everyone else. No one was heading out of town on these badly damaged back roads, let alone a Honda Civic, when even the National Guard couldn’t even make it down our road with tires bigger than me.
We resigned ourselves to living the way we know how to live without power–candles, and jugs of water, and simple meals; only we couldn’t use the front porch as refrigerator as we did after a winter storm.
Once again we envied those with generators, and talked about getting one ourselves, but I was always wary about the dangers, and it wasn’t the loss of the refrigerator or the lights that hit me the hardest–but the absence of flushing toilets.
I know it’s not very Vermont of me, and I did always want an outhouse with a moon-shaped cut out on the door, but instead I sent my husband down our driveway and across the road to the pond, to fill up a bucket with water, and pour it carefully into the tank of the downstairs toilet so that we might get at least one flush a day.
Thus, the next morning, after my husband left for work, it didn’t take me long to figure out what happened when my young son called up from the bathroom to say,
“Mom, there’s a fish in the toilet!”
But it was the last straw.
“What do you mean?” I called down the stairs, just as desperately.
“A fish, Mom. There’s an actual fish in the toilet,” he replied.
“Is it alive?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“How big is it?”
And we continued this separate floor conversation like this until I told him, “Just scoop it out, and take it back to the pond.”
“Can’t I just flush it, Mom?” he asked.
“No!” I replied, “It will die. Just scoop it out and take it back to the pond.”
I know it was a big request for a tiny thing that he’d string on a fishing pole on any other day, but after seeing the devastation to my town, I couldn’t bear another loss, however small.
“I can’t” he replied quietly.
“Why? Just get a cup or something.”
“I can’t… because I’ve already used the bathroom.”
“Pee?” I asked.
“Nope,” he replied.
“Oh.”
And so I resigned myself to sending this poor little unsuspecting fish who survived the Great Flood of 2011 to its end in our septic tank.
“Go ahead and flush,” I called to my son, as one who selfishly demanded water for her toilet.
This Vermont Life 