Letter from Vermont

That appointment we had to keep early last week was Olya’s US citizenship test.  We have had a blessedly smooth experience with Immigration, especially since moving to Vermont.  The office in St Albans is small and easy to find, you park at the front door, it is quiet inside, and things generally run as they ought to.  Quite refreshing in comparison to our interminable days going by crowded train to the crowded JFK building in crowded Boston back when we lived in crowded Massachusetts. 

It is very easy to take for granted the quality of life here in Vermont.  All the “normal” difficulties of life in 21st century America are just not present.  The big ones and the little ones.  There is no such thing as traffic.  It’s rare to have your restaurant meal interrupted by a cellphone ringing at a nearby table.  There is no urban crime to speak of.  There’s very little urban to speak of.  The air is clean.  It’s quiet. 

Sometimes I believe Vermonters don’t fully grasp how good we’ve got it living in this sparsely populated state.  One of our repeat guests has this great line that he likes to come to ride his bicycle around Vermont because “the whole state is like a National Park.”  Which is true.  And to Vermont’s credit, most Vermonters seem to realize that the part our state plays in the American story is a unique one, the gift of stunning geography and splendid isolation, all within an easy drive of Boston and New York.  Without constant visitors from which places, Vermont as it knows itself would quickly cease to be.

So how about that visitor from Siberia and her test?  Well, of course she passed, and I am so proud of her.  Next month right here at the grade school a mile west of us, Olya will take her oath as an American citizen.  At the end of her interview, the immigration officer congratulated Olya and presented her with a gift which brought tears to my eyes.  What moved me so?  Some other time, perhaps.

I feel the need to justify our inn being closed for two months.  It isn’t that we’re unmotivated or lazy, nor that we’re poor businesspeople.  No, when we decided to close the inn temporarily, it was because we had a rather momentous event coming up: the birth of our second child.

Our first daughter, Klara Cordelia, was born at the inn a little over two years ago.  In fact, she was born in the same room that she sleeps in every night.  Our midwife, Melissa, was wonderful, and the whole experience of a home birth was just what we wanted: calm, warm, and not at all hospital-antiseptic feeling.  Olya’s labor for our first baby was about six hours, and our midwife told us then that the next labor was likely to be quicker, so we should be prepared.  Well, we knew that all in advance, but you’re never really prepared to deliver your own child with no medical assistance.  In the event, that is exactly what happened.

We closed the inn for a couple of weeks of “nesting” before Olya’s due date, and for six weeks after, to ensure that the new baby would have our full attention.  A little after 3 o’clock in the morning on her due date, Olya woke me and said “I think I am going to get into the bathtub; I am having a contraction.”  We called the midwife and asked her to come.  Our midwife unfortunately lives about 30 miles away (even in Vermont, it’s not that common a profession), and it was a snowy, slushy middle-of-the-night.  When she arrived at our door, I was able to answer her question “How is Olya doing?” with “She’s fine, and so is our new daughter.”  Agatha Grace was born at 4:15, about an hour after Olya’s first signs of contractions.

Everything was so quick, and so smooth.  And so wonderful.  Never would I purposely plan to have been the only one helping Olya deliver our baby, but I feel such a special bond toward Agatha.  For the first half-hour of her life, only the three of us were there together.  No one had touched her but us; no one had looked into her eyes except us; no one knew that she had been born save us.  It was an awesome sense of closeness.

Later that day, and in coming days, as we shared our little Agatha with family and our good news with friends, there were lots of jokes about the inn offering obstetrics vacations, childbirth while-you-relax packages, and so on.  Russians believe in newborns staying at home with only immediate family for a full month, and that was our intent with Agatha as it had been our practice with Klara.  We sheltered Agatha as best we could from bad weather, visitors with colds, and the like, but this past Tuesday we took her for her first car trip.  Her mother had an appointment so important that she could not miss it, and Agatha had to leave the shelter of home.  What could be so compelling?  Some other time, perhaps.

We’ve had quite a few visitors lately.  Yesterday, the couple who owned our house from 1982 to 1998 stopped by.  Roy and Lois are a wonderful couple who still live in town.  We went around the house with them and shared a lot of their fond memories.  Might be a good time to introduce our house, since it is such a part of our lives:

The “house” is actually an antique country inn in Vermont.  The family who built it in 1872 was named Churchill; the house is now the Churchill House Inn, and it is the reason a classically-trained Siberian violinist (Olya) came to live in a small Vermont village.  On our honeymoon, we had stayed near Bar Harbor, Maine, at a very pleasant bed and breakfast called Oceanside Meadows.  The innkeepers’ lifestyle seemed very attractive, and when I had the opportunity to change jobs, we decided we’d like to try innkeeping.  We wanted to spend more time together, and three meals a day with each other, working and living in the same house seems to qualify. 

We took a seminar for aspiring innkeepers, and followed that up with a month-long car trip around a good part of the United States, leisurely looking for the right fit.  We looked from Maine to Minnesota to Georgia and back up, and finally chose an inn just three hours from home, in Rutland County, Vermont, where my great-great-grandfather Lyman Taylor was born and raised.  We’re in our fourth year here, and it continues to be a wonderful experience. 

This year, we decided to close the inn for March and April.  And, wouldn’t you know it, we had a “walk-in” couple come to the door this afternoon looking for a room.  We rarely have walk-ins because of our out-of-town location at the Green Mountain National Forest.  We were able to send this couple (hiking around Vermont from Germany) to one of the B&Bs in the village that we knew would take care of them wonderfully.   

So why have we closed the inn for two months?  Some other time, perhaps. 

A classic small town moment around lunchtime today.  Our friend Dick Kirby dropped by unannounced in that special way of his.  Dick and his wife Debbie live a couple of miles away from us, closer to the village.  Dick is retired from the utility company, and he and Debbie raise Angora goats on their hobby farm called Kirby’s Happy Hoofers.  All of the most fashionable ladies in Brandon have a pair of Debbie’s ultra-warm mohair mittens, which they wear when walking around the village for exercise or just in the course of running their errands.  Dick brought over two very soft and very warm pairs of socks, not for a special occasion, but as a gift between friends.  This is one of those small-town kindnesses that is so common that you wouldn’t call it special, but so special that you’d never consider it common.

Dick became our friend because my wife is a classically-trained Siberian violinist.  Dick is quite an impresario with his fiddle, and he and his good friends Frank Bunting (retired lawyer, violin and vocals) and Dottie Kline (Brandon’s piano maestro, but more on that another time) have a little group they call “Bows ‘N’ Ivories.”  Their quite-elderly third violin player had recently passed away, and they were looking for a new violinist shortly after we came to Vermont.  Perhaps I might mention that their repertoire tends to show-tunes, sing-a-longs, and generally nostalgic pieces which they perform for community events like Farmer’s Markets, senior center dinners, bus tours at the village inn, and so forth.  

My wife, Olya, is a good 40 years younger than any of them and knows none of the music they play.  Growing up in the Soviet Union and studying music in a formal setting, she hadn’t really heard a lot of numbers from the Great American Songbook, had she?  Still, she was game when he asked, and she’s been performing with them for a couple of years now, broadening her musical horizons from plain old Vivaldi concerti and Tchaikovsky tone-poems towards the more intriguing Tin Pan Alley and Broadway standards that keep the audiences tapping their toes and humming along at their concerts.  Frank leads the sing-a-longs through a paper megaphone and you would absolutely swear Rudy Vallee had come back for the evening.  Once in a while, Olya gets them to try something from her music case … nothing too heavy, you realize, but Bows ‘N’ Ivories does a pretty nice Pachelbel’s Canon now.

So how did a classically-trained Siberian violinist come to live in a small Vermont village?  Some other time, perhaps … 

What a blessing to experience the first stirrings of Spring after what has been a Winter of considerable stamina here in the Green Mountains.  We thought Springtime would be a promising moment to begin our new blog.  In choosing a title, we take a page from Alistair Cooke’s celebrated “Letter from America,” which aired on the BBC from 1946 - 2004.  In fact, the first Letter from America was broadcast this very week in that first post-war Spring. 

While Spring is indeed stirring, Winter is still with us this afternoon … stubborn snowbanks couch against the house up to the dining room windows.  The air remains fresh and cold, and the woodsmoke elegantly curls up from the chimneys against the strong blue sky.  The more cautious of the local drivers keep the snowtires on their cars because “you never know:”  Jack Frost may give us one final messy storm as a remembrance to carry us through to his return in October or - dare we dream? - November.  The robins, though, are hopping all over the lawn under the feeders and the shrubs, and the brook is running high and quick, harbingers and heralds of the Spring we know must surely supplant Winter before long.

We hope to make our letter from Vermont a bit of a postcard for those who read it.  We always enjoy receiving those little carefree notes that let us know someone was thinking of us when they were on their vacation; a card not because it was Christmas, or because someone had a birthday, but simply a note to acknowledge a relationship when it wasn’t required to do so, and to share the delight of spending time in a special place.  Vermont is a special place for us, and perhaps to you, too, and we are blessed to live and work here amidst its beauty in all its changing seasons.  Thanks for reading our letter; we hope you are enjoying Springtime where you are.