Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Tag: Vermont
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I sent a simple email to my neighbors. Just a courteous heads-up that I’d have a few friends visiting the farm overnight. In a rural stretch of Vermont, where each house is a good tractor’s ride away, it felt right to let them know about the extra car in my drive and the voices that…
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This afternoon, the breeze rolled in like it had somewhere to be. I sat on the porch and let it comb through my hair like the fingers of someone who knows better than to ask questions. It’s sticky out—just enough to remind me it’s June—but I’d still take this over air conditioning. I want to feel the…
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The air is cool and heavy with the scent of pine. Through my open window I hear the wind whispering in the branches—a gentle hush that carries me back to the first woods I ever loved. I remember being a little girl at summer camp, sitting cross-legged by the fading campfire on the final night.…
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I’m tucked indoors at midday, listening to the clock tick and the walls creak in the heat. The sun outside is merciless UV Index 9, which my weather app labels “very high” in that polite, understated way. In truth it’s dangerously high, the kind of sun that turns my front yard into an ultraviolet hazard zone. What…
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I’m out on the porch when the call comes through. The local tractor dealership is on the line, letting me know that my new mower deck—a long-awaited upgrade—is being assembled and will be delivered in the next couple of days. I thank them by name, because by now they answer with Hey Emily, as if…
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When I was little, I used to imagine myself barefoot and wild, running through fields that never ended—thick with tall grass and wildflowers, the air alive with monarch butterflies swarming around me like they knew I belonged there. In those dreams the sky was a fearless blue, the sun gentle on my skin, and I…
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I was raised by a father who tried to script every facet of my life. Each day was dictated by rules that my mother and I never agreed to. Having given up on trying to control my mother, he focused on me. He decided what I wore, what I could say, even what dreams I…
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As far back as I can remember, my childhood was haunted by a profound sense of fragility. While other kids were preoccupied with cartoons and playground games, I was grappling with questions of life, and death. I carried a storm inside me even as a little girl—a churning cloud of existential dread that lived under…
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I spent a year in the mouth of a whale. Not literally, of course, but in a place just as dark and confining. Inside, the outside world became a muffled hum, and time lost its meaning. It was a space of suspended existence—quiet, briny, and claustrophobic—where I felt both strangely protected, and painfully trapped. In…
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There are nights when I step outside into the silvered darkness of my Vermont farm, and the only thing I feel truly seen by is the moon. The world is quiet here—just the chorus of crickets and the distant hoot of an owl—but above me the moon hangs like an old friend. Its pale light…
