It is a sunny New Year's Day here in Billsville and I have just paused in my reading of an excellent blog by Teresa Stores, a neighbor and writer, now living with her partner and their twins in the south of France. www.strangersinthevillage.wordpress.com It is wonderful, thoroughly engaging reading and I envy them their exotic adventures near the Pyrenees.
I must savor the quiet life in the Vermont village they have left behind. I thought of them, and missed their presence at, a friend's New Year's Eve party last night. The much-talked-about blue moon couldn't be seen directly through the clouds, but it gave off a bright diffuse light that shone on the snow-covered fields. Our car's headlights lit up the snow-packed narrow River Road and the trees, heavy with snow, that hung over it. We passed the houses and barns lit with Christmas lights and I was struck, once again, how lovely Vermont is this time of year, just as one might see in a children's picture book. Many of the images from an old Vermont Magazine from the 1950s that I have in the wicker basket upstairs, are still strikingly similar today. Because the river lies in the bottom of the valley, to get to River Road, we turn off and go down from Brook Street. Houses to the the left sit higher up as the terrain begins to steepen and to the right, they sit low, on the wide plain of the river's edge. Caryl and Joe's house lies between the road and the river.
After two and half miles, we saw the cars lining their driveway and behind their lit-up house, we saw the sparks from a bonfire. Their new home, finally finished last February from a post and beam kit-house, is spacious and lovely. It was warm and welcoming inside with Joe's homemade bread--round, hearty loaves exactly as one might see in an Italian bakery; Caryl had knocked herself out making chili, chicken parmesan, salad, cheesecake. Friend's contributed: Kim's curried bean soup, Rihanna's fried plaintains with spicy mango dip; Saskia's cookies. I brought spiced nuts and smoked oyster dip. Some of the kids were outside by the fire, others were playing upstairs, excited about watching a movie on the big projector Joe had set up. The parents mingled downstairs, drinking wine. I came in before Paul and worried when, after some time, he did not join me. Lo and behold, he'd gone off the edge of the icy driveway and good ol' Ted pulled him out with a tow line. The kids ate at the long wooden table first, and while they watched the movie, we took our place at the table and feasted.
We got home at 9 PM, happily many hours before the midnight revelers hit the roads. We watched a Thin Man movie, which I remember fondly from my childhood--especially the naughty wire-haired terrier, Asta, and the silly, elegant antics of Nick and Nora Charles. Paul fell asleep, dismayed at my fondness for the film. Nokie, our half-retriever, half-shepherd (we don't know really what mix he is, but he is sixty-five pounds, with a thick reddish-gold and black coat), got up repeatedly to bark at Asta, his nose next to our now, old-fashioned small TV screen.
At midnight, I gently woke Paul so we could toast with sparkling apple cider and observe, with fascination and horror, the painful presence of Dick Clark, his face a mask of dark make-up and the after-affects of a stroke, which makes his speech and movements strained. I wondered what kind of strange vanity, or perhaps loyalty as he sees it, would make him continue his long-tradition of hosting New Year's Eve on Times Square? I wondered what friend, agent or publicist would encourage him to keep doing it? The presence of the lively and superciliously superficial Ryan Seacrest (young enough to be his grandson), his "co-host", standing next to him at the end, was too bizarre to be believed. A strange little entertainment circus.
Happily, I was set right again, when I stepped outside with the dog, who trotted down the shoveled path to the compost pile by the river. The moon's light through the clouds made the snow look like marzipan and the stark, towering trees were dark except for the neat layering of white along the top edges of their branches. Our old sugar house, which we use for storage and is set up on on the rising hill of our backyard, near the stone wall that delineates our property from a vast stretch of woods (owned by someone we have never met), was topped with a fat cake of snow. We went to bed after that and, Harvey, our fat white and black cat, who sleeps in the crook of my left arm, was carried, literally, into my sleep, where I dreamt that as I shopped, walked around a parking lot and spoke to people, he stayed nestled under my armpit.
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