“When I finally resettle again over the mountain, I’ll miss these evening drives back home to Chelsea. A chill wind picked up, the tail end of dinner, as we sat at an improvised table in the garden. White linen over plywood, a bottle of salmon-colored liquid neatly placed amid a bevy of sparkling glasses. We’ve become fond of admiring our day’s work. “I only wish I’d bought electric fence insulators that were a different color than yellow”, said one. “I think when the grass seed takes hold, we can cut a crisper edge”, said another. “I’m tired but I’m almost getting used to this,” said the third. “Mom, can I bury the leggy stems of these transplants?”. Okay, I don’t know everything about everything. But I can make an educated guess. These are topics that bring us joy and normalcy, steeped in our own wisdom, unfettered by so-called “official” reports. Vermont used to be a repository for its own deep rooted, tried and true, come hell or high water self-diagnosis. We’d no sooner take a directive from some highfalutin’ authority as shoot ourselves in the foot. I guess television and mass media changed all that, without us even really noticing too much. When you’re bone tired at the end of a long day of manual labor, you plunk down and engage in a little bit of well earned passivity, due to exhaustion. I experience it all the time. Or if you have some computer based or government job, you’ll absorb things by osmosis not so much in your best interest but in alignment with virtue signaling - what I might call the prison of the privileged. No matter. We’re not all that different, we’re just at different stages of frustration with the system we’ve been born into. The longer you can pretend things are just slightly out of whack, the better, right? I don’t have that luxury. Pulling off ticks, unsure of where I can go to the bathroom at jobs, prohibited from eating meals on the road due to store closures, unable to make phone calls due to a speech disability, shunned by those who demand “social distancing”, judged by those who think healthy people are a danger to society, abandoned by friends who don’t have the time or interest to educate themselves, forced to document with a pencil all the brilliant material being systematically scrubbed from the internet, expected to continue to be a law abiding citizen dutifully paying self-employment taxes while trillions “go missing” from the US Treasury, encouraged to smile and comply when my gas-lighting meter is pinned to ten ... well, people, what can i tell you. Some of us do not have protection and do not have a buffer. We soldier on, year after year, working with diligence, trying to stay positive. But at the bottom, is a spiritual question, which nags, and snags and festers. What’s the point?”
