Well… life has been rather trying for me of late.
The weather has at least been properly autumnal, with foggy mornings and bright blue skies for the rest of the day. The trees are turning, if not vibrant Vermont autumn, then at least a bit more color than brown. We even had a frost warning for Thursday morning. I picked all the chiles and green tomatoes that I felt like salvaging. The tomatoes are ripening on the kitchen window now.
The frost held off over my town, though it did end gardens at higher elevations. But weather things turned decidedly scary on Saturday…
Over the weekend, a very early and very powerful nor’easter made landfall, flooding much of the coast of southern New England and south as far as Delaware, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power, and causing at least one fatality. Here in Vermont, we got little of the predicted wind and have only had a light drizzle, though the main precipitation is supposed to fall today. We’ll see. There is still an enormous high pressure cell parked over Ontario, Canada. In fact, it covers almost all of that large Canadian province. It’s diverting weather systems away from the northern half of Vermont. This nor’easter might be strong enough to put a dent in the pressure system. Indeed, the pressure has dropped substantially from its normal autumnal highs… But I don’t think it’s strong enough to force much moisture north. And, in any case, it isn’t traveling north. It doesn’t seem to be moving very much at all. It’s still swirling around, centered on New York, with much of the heaviest rain falling on New Jersey and Philadelphia — though it’s also still pouring in Boston and Cape Cod, with wind-driven waves as high as 10 feet. And those winds are approaching hurricane strength, with several locations posting gusts of 74mph, which is the minimum wind speed for hurricane status.
Now, while the storm is not here, it is causing chaos in Brooklyn, so I’m worried about my son. Also, I just tend to fret about such things as enormous, destructive storms…
However, that worry is sort of taking a back seat to the health issues. I am still very sick. I am weak and exhausted and in tremendous pain. I have had low sporadic fevers for weeks, and these have intensified recently. Saturday night I had to change pajamas twice because I sweated through them as a rather strong fever broke. Yet, after a month of testing for literally every known pathogen, almost everything has been ruled out… except cancer. The biopsies come back this week. So there’s that… But the constant bloody diarrhea and inability to eat much for nearly six weeks has come with its own problems. Friday I had a blood sugar crash so strong it caused violent tremors and sent me to the emergency room. I probably haven’t been able to properly absorb my thyroid pills since at least the antibiotics run back at the beginning of the month. So I’m very tired and achy. I have not been able to take ibuprofen since I’m bleeding so continually, and that has given free rein to the arthritis. I can feel every bone… I don’t think you should be able to map out your skeleton based on pain… And the treatment for all this has not even begun…
So… yeah… not been great.
And this is taking its toll on my garden. I have not been able to dig the potatoes. I’ve not been able to compost the dried bean and pea plants. I haven’t even picked the beans that I left out to dry for seed stock and storage. I have not planted any fall crops, nor have I seeded any cold-hardy salad greens in the cold frame — though I still have time to do that. I have not mown the grass in two… three?… weeks. Luckily, it has been mostly dry and the yard is not that overgrown. Maybe this week I’ll get my son to do that. Maybe…
But there is another project that needs addressing. I finally got the garage cleaned out and the driveway drainage fixed. I made a berm along the roadside to keep out the water flowing down the street. I also made a berm at the entry of the garage and dropped the level of soil about four inches beneath the lip of the garage’s concrete foundation. So what falls on the driveway and what comes off the garage roof will at least be substantially slowed and unlikely to have much load carrying capacity.
I have also eliminated what load of dirt there will be. I covered the drive with landscape fabric. And this past week, I took delivery of four cubic yards of gravel — which still needs to be spread around. Until that happens, my car is parked on the road. This makes it easy for me to get into the car in my much-depleted state, but it makes it very challenging to charge the car. There is an outlet. My charging cable does reach that far. But it has to drape over a public sidewalk… which I do not think is terribly safe. I’ve been covering the cable with a large piece of cardboard, but I worry that someone is going to trip. So… that’s another niggling worry…
On the other hand, the asters and mums are glorious this year! Purple, blue, white, and fuchsia asters and mums in every shade of rust and red and gold. I even have a white one with fireworks flowers that I completely forgot I planted — because it hasn’t bloomed until this year. So that all makes me very happy.
I also finally managed to refinance this house in my name alone, so I truly own my house. Now that I can be sure of not losing it, I have scheduled a large bit of chimney work to get the wood stove put into the living room hearth for emergency heating. And in this heating season of at least doubled fuel oil prices, emergency might turn into whenever 50°F feels too cold — because I won’t be able to afford to turn the thermostat up much higher than that. I have also begun the project of installing a mini-split heat pump — because I qualify for all the cheap rates and tax credits! — and a small solar electric system to run that — because the existing house circuit can not. I discovered that an electrical circuit upgrade is actually harder to finance than the solar panels and batteries, when you add in the rebates and grants and net-metering battery rental.
All that makes me happy also. If a bit jittery about the expense. Still, the refinance is paying off all my existing debts and lowering my monthly mortgage — which is amazing considering the interest rate increases. So I think I can absorb the new costs. In any case, it doesn’t feel like I have much choice. I have to do something about the heating situation…
So that’s the news from central Vermont… I hope you all are doing well. And I hope you’ll forgive me for the posting intermittency. Eventually all this will pass. Meanwhile, because I’m a little concerned that AI is breaking the internet and that WordPress might be a doomed medium, I’m gathering all these scribbles into book form. At the least, I want to publish the calendar stuff. An actual daily book… Hope to have more on that later.
©Elizabeth Anker 2026
