Biography

The Grateful Dead played twice in Highgate, Vermont in the mid-nineties. In 1994, I was supposed to work that night and the following day at Katana... the local, mid-town sushi joint. Two hours before I was due in to work, I called in desperately sick.... and was on the road. I was living in an old, brick Sesame Street double block at the time, that my mom still has nightmares about..... I'm surprised I don't still have nightmares about it.

We made it to the show, got in for free because they just plain old opened the gates (gotta love Vermont) and then left immediatley afterward at midnite. According to plan, I would have been home with three hours to spare before I was due in for my shift at the sushi joint, but we took directions from our friend TJ, who happened to be way too high to give effective directions, and what could have been a seven hour drive from Vermont to Pennsylvania turned out to be a twelve hour drive through Connecticut rush hour traffic, where everyone that drove around us either beeped or flipped us off because a Volkswagon bus, with it's windows down in fast rush hour traffic on a Connecticut freeway, is not dissimilar to a woffleball in a wind storm.... and I had to call in almost four hours late and ended up bathing and changing and finally, after all that time, brushing my hair in the bus and they practically (whoever was driving, I think it was you, Dave) just dropped the thing down into second gear as I jumped out at mid-town in my black pants and black shirt.

The second year I drove into Highgate, Vermont I was in my bus again... but this time it's interior was sweetly decorated and packed to the gills, ready for some kind of cross-country venture. Our quack mechanic supposedly rebuilt the engine and my dad advised me to, "every time the oil gets low, throw in a quart or so of oil".....'

It was seven hours to Vermont. By the time we hit the Adirondack lakes, we blew our air filter from all that oil (we kept a whole case under the fold out sofa in the van).... We ended up sawing off the end of a broom handle and lodging it between the air filter and the roof of the engine compartment to keep that filter on through a basic, first-into-second acceleration. Our first, of many, chic McGyver moves.

It was after that Highgate show that we drove into Johnson for the first time. We pulled into Main Street, just across from the coffee shop, and went into ~ what was then ~ The Pie Safe... a gift shop/deli type joint that was once the big bank in town. I think the safe had been transormed into the beer cooler.

It's now the corner book store/yarn shop. A beautiful place. Makes me wish I actually bought books new. Or bought books at all, really. My walls are too full of books I've collected over the years, books I have yet to read, to allow myself the luxury of new books. And I have way too much going on to actually knit. Much as I'd like to.

From there we landed at the farm house... and it was there that me and my van spent most of the rest of the summer.... floating through the pastures out back in patch work dresses, drinking iced coffee, smoking cigarettes and figuring out the world on the front porch of the coffee shop... all in between the four or five swimming holes we "clocked in" at through out the afternoon.

It was that summer that Johnson became my stomping ground. It was that summer that the cops would slow down as they drove past the coffee shop... taking long looks.... taking notes. It was that summer that the big cedar flower buckets placed all along the Main Street corners kept gettting trimmed down by local officials because, in between the pansies and wisteria, weed kepting growing up.

It was the same summer I learned to swim naked, that I read Mists of Avalon, that I learned to hoola-hoop, play devil sticks and widdle. I learned that summer how to build a fire, how to fish, and how to walk across a log (or as Kalinas called it... do the "walk of faith"). The first time I walked that log, my ass was black and blue for weeks. Faith took me some time. The better part of the summer, really.

I spent the next summer in Johsnon without the bus. It was the victim of my driving.. a head on collission outside of Philadelphia... the frame cracked... poor girl ruined. I lived in a tent and all my books got moldy. We built a clay oven and baked lasagne, we built devil sticks in the garage, I hitch-hiked with girlfriends. Slept on the ocean in Maine, got ticks on the ocean in Cape Cod, wrapped my arms around a Redwood in the middle of the night on a new moon in Northern California, slept in the Sequoias in Oregon and in a van in San Francisco.

That was the first year that I came back to Vermont and watched the summer turn into Autumn. It was the first time that I felt the nights here cool to an early frost, watched the rivers build a great, long mist in the morning, and woke to snow on a mountain top in September. It snowed in the valleys on Halloween that year... the first snow.

The shop porch is starting to collect red and yellow leaves. When I arrive in the morning, everything still wet with early frost, the paper having barely arrived (if it arrives at all) and the Main Street traffic still a bit sporadic, the porch is covered like confetti with dry, colorful leaves.

I can hardly remember that first fall. I can just remember the smell of the air. The way it felt on the skin. The shock of shorter days and the pace at which they shortened. I can remember renting a small little farmhouse apartment and loving the taste of maple syrup on a spoon. I can remember not having a bookshelf and so stacking the books from the floor on up. I can remember the jet-liner sound of the oil heater in our living room and just how quickly we would run out of hot water. I remember the horses up the road and how I would not wash my hands for hours so I could keep the smell on them.

I remember the transition from iced coffee on the porch of the shop to drinking hot coffee in the fall. And now, here it is late-ish September and I've had the same half gallon pitchers of iced coffee in the fridge since last weekend and, kinda like wearing flip flops till Mid-November, I just can't bring myself to pour them down the drain.

All of a sudden, I'm running out of little tea pots for my customers, instead of running out of pint glasses.... I'm making an awful lot of hot tea and hot lattes instead of iced tea and iced coffee. I'm walking faster from my car to the front door in the morning and I'm wondering if the place came with it's own snow shovel and rock salt.

We had dinner tonight with friends. Yellowtail nori rolls and miso soup with a 1990 Jerry Band show playing on the TV in the other room.... the year Brent died and they moved from the regular tour into Jerry Band tour. A mean Lucky Old Sun..... like nothing I've ever heard.

Before dinner, Ella did her homework... which was just a free-write in her journal. After dinner we tried doing splits in the living room (the hosts were Bean's karate teachers and they had come straight from karate to dinner). When we got into the car to go home, after our splits and dancing in the living room, Ella said to me, "Mom, I think I brought out your inner child." We sang to Regina Spektor the whole way home.

She wrote a poem for her free-write.

A POEM FOR AUTUMN

A chilly evening
Underneath the moon
The thought of summer
Usually means fun
Many colors fill my eyes
Now that I'm back to fall.