Waterless
We were in New Hampshire again this weekend—a quick trip planned for the purpose of picking up Andrew’s parents from a reunion in Massachusetts on Sunday and driving them to their flight in NYC. We drove up late Friday night, and though the drive was easy and Lucia slept nearly the entire way, it is a long drive, and we arrived weary—and facing the prospect of two days with no water. The spring has, obviously, not been replenished over the past week, and our water tank is barely half full. So it was a weekend of no dishwashing, no laundry, no showers, and only-when-urgently-needed toilet flushing. Surely these are the lovelier aspects of living, albeit temporarily, in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. But we left New Hampshire this time without a trip to the ER.
Saturday we drove into Woodstock, Vermont for lunch. It was a beautiful day—cool and sunny; the leaves were already beginning to change, peeks of red and yellow along the roadside. Though Woodstock tends toward the touristy, it was not crowded at all, and so we could fully enjoy the pure New England-ness of it—the clapboard houses, the prim church steeples, the old graveyards. We ate lunch at a nice restaurant, browsed in what claimed to be Vermont’s oldest independent bookstore, and looked at the work of some local artists in a park in the center of town.
So far from New York, it was easy to forget the spectre of Saturday’s date, and to forget the startling fact that I’ve spent nearly a third of my life “post-9/11”; at some point I’ll have lived longer after it than I did before it. And Lucia will never know life without it. One can only hope that it will be simply a terrible, history-textbook memory by the time she’s a child, not an easily exploited excuse for bigotry still capable of driving raving Florida maniacs to ludicrous action nine years after the fact.
Saturday we drove into Woodstock, Vermont for lunch. It was a beautiful day—cool and sunny; the leaves were already beginning to change, peeks of red and yellow along the roadside. Though Woodstock tends toward the touristy, it was not crowded at all, and so we could fully enjoy the pure New England-ness of it—the clapboard houses, the prim church steeples, the old graveyards. We ate lunch at a nice restaurant, browsed in what claimed to be Vermont’s oldest independent bookstore, and looked at the work of some local artists in a park in the center of town.
So far from New York, it was easy to forget the spectre of Saturday’s date, and to forget the startling fact that I’ve spent nearly a third of my life “post-9/11”; at some point I’ll have lived longer after it than I did before it. And Lucia will never know life without it. One can only hope that it will be simply a terrible, history-textbook memory by the time she’s a child, not an easily exploited excuse for bigotry still capable of driving raving Florida maniacs to ludicrous action nine years after the fact.
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