Letter from Vermont

Our new house really felt like a new home to us on July 27 of this year.  Olya called me at the inn to say “I think it might be today,” so I scooted home fast as I could.  Sure enough, our third daughter was born about an hour later after another of Olya’s patented no-dawdle labors.  We named her Renata Zion Hopkins, and at 8 lbs 1 oz, she was born the smallest of our three.  Klara and Agatha are doing a great job as big sisters.

Agatha has also been helping my father-in-law Vladimir, who has been restoring our front porch to its former glory.  It is so funny to watch her out there with hammer and nail at age 2 while her sister Klara (age 4) wants nothing to do with that and would rather be inside playing her violin or drawing or singing.  The daughters have such distinct personalities already.  Here is a small (winter) shot of our house which shows what Vladimir and Agatha are up against in terms of carpentry.

We’re not the only folks in Brandon putting effort toward a September spruce-up, though.  The Chamber of Commerce has a new and stylish version of its website www.brandon.org.  Vladimir has been a regular customer at Brandon Lumber this summer, and they hosted an open house earlier this month to show off their substantially remodeled showroom and store.  The town has installed a length of new, concrete sidewalk on Park Street.  And our friend Judy at The Inn on Park Street hosted her annual brother-in-law working vacation, when her sister and her husband come up from Florida and do reconstructive and cosmetic procedures on her B&B.

The best part of September in Vermont for our family, though?  Some other time, perhaps.

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.