During my annual dermatology visit the doctor and I discussed how the choices that people made in the ’60s have resulted in skin damage as we age. Sunscreen was not promoted back then like it is today. A popular trend among my high school and college friends was to slit the sides of a…

While listening to a radio conversation between two people hosting a show I heard one of them ask the other what decade he expected to hear songs from when he is told that an “oldie” is coming up. The two hosts were not close in age so one said the ’70s and the other said…

Many things have changed over the course of my lifetime and that is to be expected. However, they seem to be changing at a rapid clip and this senior can barely keep up! It seems like we all used land line phones forever and now the majority of people have cell phones. You no longer…

  I don’t think there is a female among us who hasn’t done something out of her comfort zone simply because she is dating someone who interests her. I definitely plead “guilty” to doing that almost 50 years ago! In fact, I did multiple things that were way out of my comfort zone. Perhaps my…

  How is your garden growing? As gardeners we never seem to be satisfied with the way our flowers and veggies look. I think we are too hard on ourselves! Mother Nature as well as critters alter our plans and give us results that don’t always make us happy. But most of what we plant…

  In a column written back in May by fellow Mountain Times columnist, Dom Cioffi, he told about the various friends throughout his life. That got me thinking about the friends I have made over the years. Some remain in my life but most do not. The word “friend” is used rather loosely by many…

  A classmate recently told me that she didn’t remember any sports for girls during our high school years at Mount St. Joseph Academy in the early 1960s. I didn’t recall any either so I checked the yearbooks online to see if we were correct.  The ski team was the only sports related activity showing…

  For 25 years beginning in 1975 the month of May meant the beginning of camping season for my husband, Peter, and me. We had a permanent site at Belview Campground in Barton, Vermont. Crystal Lake was so close that we just walked through a field and we were there. I was reminded of my…

When they say that life was slower “back in the day” they are probably right! It was slower because it took longer to do everything. I was thinking of that the other day when I warmed up lunch in the microwave. Back in the '50s my mother would put a casserole dish containing leftovers from…

During the course of our lives most of us have played the role of a “sales person” even if it wasn’t by choice at times. For many of us it began in our elementary school days when we sold items for fundraisers. When you were “peddling your goods” you often went with a friend. That…

If you went to school in the Rutland area chances are your school yearbook is on the website of the Rutland Historical Society. Looking at it online allows you to visually reconnect with your high school days. I sit at a breakfast table weekly with some classmates and this often results in a “verbal reconnect”…

By Mary Ellen Shaw The role that paper plays in our lives has changed so much compared to its role “back in the day!” Several years ago I was researching information about WWII and its effect locally. I visited the Rutland Historical Society and found a letter written during that war. It was correspondence between…

By Mary Ellen Shaw When I heard that Vermont State University plans to remove books from their library shelves and transition to digital books by July 1st it felt like a magic trick about to happen. Just say “Presto” and the paper books will suddenly disappear. Changes of that magnitude usually happen gradually. I have…

By Mary Ellen Shaw There is talk of building a hotel in downtown Rutland in the same location where the Berwick Hotel once stood. That hotel was destroyed by fire 50 years ago and since then the spot has been a vacant lot, known locally as “The Pit.” Recently there have been both TV and…

By Merisa Sherman It was quiet. A little too quiet. An eerie quiet. No fresh animal tracks on the ground, no wind moving the trees around. It’s so cold, you feel like even the surrounding air must be frozen even though it truly freezes at temps colder than 300 degrees. You couldn’t hear anything from…