EAST MONTPELIER – It’s been a pretty peaceful and pleasant autumn here. The drought has been bedeviling farmers and orchardists, but it’s been perfect weather for my little convertible. The legislature and governor, though occasionally having differences of opinion, have at least not been calling each other names. The news from the national stage (I use that word in a literal sense, not metaphoric) has been horrendous, but I don’t see federal troops on Vermont’s horizon, as we have on others’. I’m able to get away now and then to visit a witty and utterly compatible young lady of only 78 down near Boston. Her car starts, too, so I get return visits.
Without seeming a Pollyanna, and recognizing our problems of housing costs, homelessness, rising insurance rates, imminent cuts to our social services networks, it’s still hard to imagine anywhere else in the United States less unpleasant to live than Vermont.
My constant companion, Kiki, and I have sort of settled together into our restful mature years. Decent days, we walk in the park or hit the coffee shop. Alternatively, we sit back to back in the office, each in their own chair. I try to pay bills when they come in; she snaps at buzzing cluster flies. I try to keep us in groceries and schedule appointments and routine maintenance; she roams a circle a couple of hundred feet from the house and keeps vicious predators from sneaking up on us by night.
Pleasant, serene, restful and sedate. All of those words have described our current existence. But suddenly, with overnight company in the offing, my microwave oven died horribly, sparking and sizzling as if about to explode. Moving hardly a muscle, I remained at my desk, looking for a replacement of the exact same size.
I was going nowhere with the effort, until I happened to mention it to my daughter, who lives just a few miles away. This triggered a lightning-fast visit from my son-in-law, about whom there ought to be a TV series starring a guy who can fix anything.
He gave me a lesson in new-age repairs. He opened the microwave oven door, whipped out his cellphone, and took a photo of the tag inside the door. “This thing was made in 2006!” he cried, as if that were before the Civil War. His phone gave him the number of the proper replacement unit, and within minutes it was on its way.
I’m constantly dazzled by technology, but this was beyond amazing. I don‘t know where the new unit came from, but it got here in about 48 hours. (It could have been quicker if I’d been willing to pay extra. Which I wasn’t).
About the same time, my son and daughter-in-law arrived from Arkansas for a visit. They were in a great big rented pickup truck (he’s a Jeep guy), and asked, when they got here, if I had a to-do list. Well, yeah. There was, for example, a pile of rubbish left over from my recent tenant’s clean-out downstairs. They wrestled it all out the big front door of the cellar, and in not much more time than it takes to tell it, handed me dump receipts for just over half a ton of stuff.
I could feel the energy level around the house rising swiftly, way too fast for me to keep up. The microwave arrived. The two boys removed it from its carton while I was going for a knife, and installed it, ventilating shroud, trim kit, and all, as I was still fretting about whether it’d fit. The boys (actually men of middle years, but their ages relative to mine assign them the permanent status of “the boys”) did seem to give grudging approval of my proper, to-code electric hookup of eighteen years ago, which pleased me secretly.
That’s pretty much the way things went for a few days. We were expecting more guests, the woman from Texas who fostered Kiki as a puppy in 2017, her husband, and a German friend who’s just written a book about the former death zone, now a green belt and wildlife preserve, between East and West Germany. So off they went to the Farmers Market and came back with plenty. Kerstin, my German friend, had brought a large Apfelkuchen with whipped cream.
It was Old Home Week.
I couldn’t help but notice, during both dinner and afternoon Kuchen, that the conversation was as fast and heavy as everything else that had happened those few .days. I just sat back and listened. It was glorious. Next morning the kids left. I went to strip the guestroom bed and belatedly contribute to the group effort. I found my daughter-in-law had already washed and dried everything and remade the bed. Can it be that my progeny no longer need my leadership?
That makes me very happy.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
