The bride inspects her garden, East Albany VT

I could have danced barefoot to a bluegrass band from Montreal by a raging bonfire with 300 wedding guests. I could’ve dropped off A, C and T at our cabin, turned around and driven the maze of dirt roads back to the party.

Then I could’ve shaken it for hours in my red dress, Kingdom-style, with the farmers, artists, homesteaders, cheese-makers, carpenters, loggers, neo-hippies, bartenders, landscapers, writers, lovers, players, and wild children who live under the unpolluted Northern sky.

So much open space up there.  Network of empty dirt roads traversing boreal forest and green pasture. Wildflowers and jewel lakes.  Sheep and cows grazing beneath giant maples.  Vistas sweeping away to mountain ridgelines.  Expanse of wilderness and pristine farmland.  The Kingdom!  Its landscape still calls to the romantic poet in me.

 That’s why I moved there in 1998, allegedly for a single winter of ski racing and working at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center.  That’s why I lived and loved in a 10′ x 10′ former hunting cabin (no phone or plumbing, yes electricity and woodstove).  That’s why I turned down grad school at the University of Michigan– move to Ann Arbor, and leave this remote paradise!?– and stayed for over six years.  The landscape, yes, but also the skiing, the adventures, the people, the independent rugged lifestyle deeply rooted in the land.

But that’s also a bygone era.  My old housemate Emily from the South Albany Social Club, sometimes called the South Albany Hot Tub Parlor (and occasionally, by naysayers, the House of Sin), just got married and is raising chickens, calves, oxen and probably soon, babies.  Our hot tub parties and Beltane parties and Full Moon Solstice parties are fading into a distant memory of desire and dancing.  The younger generation is keeping the flame alive, going out to the Kingdom Playground on an occasional Friday night, skinny-dipping by moonlight in Hartwell Pond, carefree, flirtatious, open to summer’s possibility.

T and C under a darkening sky, East Albany VT

Me, I drove back to our dark cabin with my family after the wedding.  We all swam naked in Caspian Lake (A. watched with Hello Kitty from the beach) before going to bed at 9 pm.  Then we headed down South, retracing our 150 mile journey down the Interstate to Southern Vermont, the “Banana Belt” of Brattleboro, where it’s a good 10 degrees warmer year-round.  

It’s another world down here, a faster one, a more populated one, but a good one.

Our house, gardens, animals and friends were waiting for us.  Sungolds and sunflowers.  Fresh eggs and raspberries.  Once again, Wherever You Go, There You Are.

C with oxen (and electric fence)

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