By Kristen Fountain All of a sudden, sap season is here and winter’s on its way out. Chances are, though, a few more snow or ice squalls are still to come. The next time you find yourself driving behind a big plow truck, take a look at what’s coming out of the spreader. What is…

By Dom Cioffi Sometime around 1915, a dapper 33-year-old Italian immigrant named Charles arrived in Boston, Mass., looking to embark on the great American dream. Prior to arriving in the big city, Charles had spent time in prison for forging checks and smuggling immigrants from Canada. However, having paid his debt to society, Charles was…

By Michael J. Caduto Walking through the woods on a cool spring morning, I saw a barred owl in an old maple tree. I circled the owl three times from a distance. Its head kept turning to follow me, tracking my movements with three complete revolutions. One of the owl’s chicks had fallen from the…

With Easter upon us I can’t help but reminisce about how the occasion was celebrated back in my day. The Easter Bunny certainly had his role just like today but because I grew up in a Catholic family the religious significance of this special day was stressed. Our first “challenge” of the season began on…

After 17 years of Leno and Letterman, our crucial late-night television talk shows are in an unusual state of flux: in the past 14 months, Jimmy Fallon has taken over “The Tonight Show,” Seth Meyers has taken over “Late Night,” Stephen Colbert has transferred from “The Colbert Report” to “The Late Show,” Chelsea Handler has…

By Dom Cioffi Sometimes all it takes is a lucky break. Such is the case for Reyn Guyer. Far from a household name, Guyer has hit it big in the toy industry not once, but twice in his lifetime. But none of his industry fame or millions of dollars would have materialized had it not…

By Barbara Mackay The transition from February to March is not subtle. With hardly time to recover from a truncated month, we attend Town Meeting, cede an hour to our clocks, and navigate spontaneously erupting frost heaves. The forest is going through a seasonal transition, too, but at a more leisurely pace, and often invisibly.…

If you’re like me, you never watch regular-season college basketball, and then when the NCAA tournament rolls around and nobody can talk about anything else, you have to root arbitrarily for certain teams and against others, since you have no idea who the players are on either team or what they’re like. Yet it strikes…

I first discovered James Joel six years ago when he was playing with Ryan Fuller in the duo group Fuller n’ the Hole at Center Street Saloon in Rutland, during my Monday night bar shift, which we referred to as “Mayhem Mondays.” Joel has really progressed over the years and has built a nice solo…

By Dom Cioffi It was as urban ghetto as our little Vermont town was ever going to get. It was the early 1980s and we had just been declared legal to drive (which consequently gave us the freedom to roam). Sure, we’d hit the gorge or the movie theater on occasion, but most of the…

By David Barrell Perhaps only at Suicide Six do skiers and riders pass by a hen house while skiing on the Back Door trail. By Karen D. Lorentz Where can you ski by a chicken coop with hens fluttering around and a few minutes later descend a steep slope made famous by ski racers, yet…

By Carolyn Lorié If you peek into a wood duck nesting box during the breeding cycle, you might find 10 to 11 eggs, which is the bird’s normal clutch size. But you might also stumble upon a box overflowing with as many as 30 eggs. How, you might ask, can one duck lay and care…

Back in the '50s it was easy to tell when it was Sunday. I’m not sure it’s so simple any more! Shopping was not an option, as downtown stores were closed except for small food stores, pharmacies and places that sold newspapers and sundry items. There was no mall or shopping center. Life pretty much…

In the immediate aftermath of the courtroom verdict that awarded $7.4 million of the profits from the 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” to the family of Marvin Gaye (whose 1977 single “Got to Give It Up” was allegedly plagiarized), two distinct groups of commentators formed. On the one hand, countless “experts”—lawyers, journalists, musicians, musicologists—emerged with articles…

It’s virtually impossible to scroll through Facebook and Instagram and not come upon hashtagged gym selfies and food photos repping every approach to health—from #paleo to #rawvegan and everything in between. Personally, I have dabbled in essentially every diet, macronutrient ratio, and “lifestyle” out there, and what I’ve found is exactly what has been claimed…