By Merisa Sherman I can feel it pulling me, step by step I move further into the darkness. The deeper I go, the thicker the leaves become until the only sunlight is sprinkled on the ground like glitter. I can only follow the trail, as it winds its way through the trees. A dirt path,…

By Merisa Sherman It’s that fun time of year, when there’s a fly in my ear. And my eye, and nose and also my beer. There is so much greatness in Vermont and such wonderful people, oftentimes it feels like we are living in a dream world. The green mountains, trails that wind through and…

By Merisa Sherman May is the best adventuring month. I’m not even debating about it. Once May rolls around, there is just so much excitement to be had — and the only negative is choosing what to do each day. Paddling season is cruising along and the ponds were just restocked for the season. The…

By Merisa Sherman We pulled into the boat launch just before sunrise, the darkness just lifting enough so that we could see to undo the tie down straps without any help from our headlamps. You could hear the scraping of fabric as life jackets were pulled from the car. In the predawn silence, the sound of…

By Merisa Sherman Holding my mug in my hands, I stare out the window at my garden. My forehead is almost pressed to the glass, the warmth of the morning sun just starting to take effect. I empty my mind of all thoughts, letting the sun soak into my bones as I close my eyes…

By Merisa Sherman I awoke to a deafening silence. The birds of spring, so vocal in their morning song, had vanished. In fact, there was no noise at all — an eerie silence had overtaken the earth. It was almost as if a sound absorbing blanket had been spread over the earth while we had…

By Merisa Sherman For a few days every spring, there comes a magical moment for paddlers in Vermont. A section of the Otter Creek swells over the road and fills in a dairy farm pasture. The fields and some forests fill with a few feet of water, making this a paddler’s dream adventure. For years,…

By Merisa Sherman They were everywhere. Random and haphazard, they were strewn about like something had exploded. Pieces of all shapes and sizes littered the ground, discarded from their base as if they were nothing. Things that were once essential were now strewn about as if they had never really mattered in the first place.…

By Merisa Sherman As the sky turns a bright blue and the temps begin to rise, the special weirdness that is spring skiing begins to show its true colors. Midwinter black turns into a myriad, almost hideous bright colors. Every single shade of everything is on display — and even some that might qualify more…

By Merisa Sherman As I write this article I am trying to fathom the past year. In some ways, the memories are so amazingly precise and in others, it feels like we have all been living in a dream. I cannot decide which is more the dream — the boisterous life that we had before…

By Merisa Sherman I’m not sure if I recognize the voices, but the words wash over me like an old, worn blanket. The patterns of phrasing, the flow of emotions, combined with just the right amount of grit, make the memories come floating back and I am transported. The imaginary smells of popcorn, hot dogs…

By Merisa Sherman We’ve got open water in Killington! It was a bluebird spring day in February, so I had chosen the long way home along the river. There, uncovered by the warming sun, was something wonderful and rare. I felt my heart skip a beat. There was open water in February! The snow had…

By Merisa Sherman We paused for a moment, as we often do, to contemplate the potential stupidity of what we were about to do. It looked gorgeous, the snow glittering in the sunlight across the descending waves of the field at our feet. You could just make out the tracks of those who had been…

By Merisa Sherman It has not stopped snowing for weeks. Every morning, I wake up and look outside the window only to reach for the shovel. Every day, I’m shoveling. It might just be a few inches of fluff, but it still has to get relocated before it freezes solid and makes my walkways a…

By Merisa Sherman We were lost. Well, not quite. I guess it would depend on your definition of lost. If it meant that we had no specific idea where we were or that we weren’t exactly where we thought we would be, then I guess you could say we were lost. But then again, if…