VALLEY LIFE COLUMNS

What Remains

I was not prepared for the visceral reaction I had to the experience of being completely disoriented on a trail I know intimately.

9/11

All of us who were old enough to be aware of the events of Sept. 11, 2001 have our own 9/11 stories. My story is unremarkable, but it’s mine, and it is seared in my memory, as I imagine that many of you have your own 9/11 stories indelibly imprinted in yours.

In other towns, while you’re waiting for a yoga class to begin it’s all dim light, incense, rhythmic stress-relief music and hushed tones. If you unroll your mat with too loud of a thwap, the woman next to you lying in Supta Virasana opens a single eye to glare at you. You acknowledge no one. You are at this class for one purpose only: to practice the solitary and ancient mental, physical and spiritual discipline of yoga.

Barefoot Badass Wolverines

A person can live here for many years and not be considered a local, but still there are occasional milestones that make a person feel like she/he belongs in a place. One such moment for me was when Hank (of Hank’s Harvest Foods, of course) started calling me by name. And another came just recently when I was given the chance to be a badass wolverine.

Future Selves

I recently took my 11-year-old daughter and her friend skiing out of the Chickadee Trailhead. We were coming down Meadowlark and got to a spot with a sweeping view below of Thompson Road, which we had climbed up earlier. The girls stopped and were yelling “hello!” and waving wildly at the road below. I thought they had spotted some other skiers and were waving to them, but they told me, no, they were waving to themselves — the people they would be in four or five minutes when we descended from Meadowlark and rejoined Thomson Road. They were, in essence, waving to their future, older selves.

Peonies

When my husband and I started building our house one spring, our neighbor, lifelong valley resident Donna Martin, called me over to give me some peony roots. Her peonies were so prolific that they needed to be divided and distributed.

The Triumph of Defeat

The fall sports season has come to a close for Liberty Bell students, and I know that not all of the final contests ended up the way the student athletes hoped they would. As a parent — and especially one who didn’t play sports until college — it’s hard to know to respond to your child’s sadness after a game or race or season that didn’t end in triumph. You feel sad — not that they didn’t win, but that their joy in an otherwise highly successful season is, temporarily at least, obscured by a single defeat.

Oh Christmas Tree

As we all know, there’s nothing that beats the post-holiday doldrums like a tale of woe from someone else’s Christmas tree hunt, so I am sharing this story now instead of hoarding it until next year.

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VALLEY LIFE COLUMNS

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