By Declan McCabe Clouds of tiny insects, rising and falling hypnotically along lake shores, contribute to the ambiance of warm summer evenings. My recent bike ride was interrupted by a lungful of this ambiance. If you find yourself in a similar predicament, you might wonder what these miniscule flies were doing before being swallowed, where…

On Aug. 31, at the American Legion’s national convention in Cincinnati, Hillary Clinton gave a 35-minute speech that I wish I could quote in its entirety. Its subject was the strictly magical doctrine of “American exceptionalism”—a concept that, rather than merely celebrating our nation’s uniqueness, attributes to the United States an inherent righteousness upon which…

By Cal Garrision, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Scorpio Moon, in the aftermath of a New Moon eclipse, with a chorus of background aspects that could go either way, depending on how well we are able to assess our emotional responses. As far as…

By Dom Cioffi I suppose the navigation of a cancer diagnosis involves countless hurdles. In that regard, I believe I have successfully traversed a couple early ones. The first hurdle for anyone diagnosed with cancer involves the revelation. There’s no doubt that telling people, especially those with strong emotional bonds to your wellbeing, is difficult.…

By Dom Cioffi As frequent readers of this column know, my reviews tend to be more “diary” than “movie.” I succumbed to this approach years ago when I realized my ramblings about life had a lot more substance than most of the films I was watching. As of late (because of my recent cancer diagnosis),…

By Marguerite Jill Dye Killington is a Mecca for athletes where skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, running, and hiking abound. Such “sportivities” (my invention and not in the dictionary) foster fitness, discipline, and competition and require goal setting and striving for excellence. Watching the exciting Olympic events on television and Killington’s full summer and year round…

The ads for “Back to School” items have been appearing in flyers for most of August. They bring back memories that are happy ones for me. Back in the 1950s every neighborhood in Rutland had a public school close by. I would have attended parochial school at Christ the King but they didn’t have a…

Today’s run was wet. Really wet. I went on vacation recently and took about seven days off from training, so am really not feeling anything about a Spartan race, but part of me wants to see what I can do starting from basically nothing. Realistically though, I am not starting from nothing, I am starting…

By Joe Rankin You can pretty much count on a tree to stay in one place, at least in the real world. Not so in fiction. Remember the walking, talking Ents in the Lord of the Rings movies? Or Groot, the tree-like alien in the science fiction film “Guardians of the Galaxy?” Roots anchor a…

In August, the musician Frank Ocean self-distributed a 366-page zine called “Boys Don’t Cry.” Alongside photography and poetry, the zine (an album release tie-in) made room for an unannotated list of Frank Ocean’s 100 favorite movies—although it wasn’t numbered, so the only way you would know that he’d aimed for a round sum was if…

By Cal Garrison, a.k.a. Mother of the Skye This week’s Horoscopes are coming out under the light of a Leo Moon, on the heels of a Mercury/Venus/Jupiter conjunction at the 28th Degree of Virgo. This is a totally beneficent trinity that will mean different things to different people. On the surface it has the potential…

By Rev. Lee Alison Crawford In the end, gravity always wins. For about 60 years, the barn that Oren Bates built has been a fixture on the Mission Farm property. One notices it even as one barrels by at 50 m.p.h. over on Route 4. A quick glance across the fields and river is all…

By Laurie Morrissey Birdsong has always fascinated humans. Besides waking some of us up a wee bit too early in the morning, it has inspired musical compositions and immortal poetry. It has produced lush descriptions, like those of the early 1900s field guide author F. Schuyler Mathews, who wrote of the wood thrush’s song: “It…

People in their late 20s and early 30s are able to determine which of their peers are attempting to become “real adults” by checking for an array of telltale signs: a marriage, a mortgage, a Costco membership, a firm support for the pragmatic politics of Hillary Clinton. For the past decade, there has perhaps been…

By Brady Crain Last week on one of my hikes, I got neck deep in some poison parsnip. I don’t believe that I am particularly allergic to this plant, because the only places it broke out was on my legs, which were covered with fresh bleeding scratches from scrabbling through raspberry and blackberry, not to…