Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
Tuesday morning there was brown fog. Is is still smog when the smoke is from wildfires that are burning hundreds of miles away? Do we need a new term for foreign smoke and local fog blanketing a largely rural region? I looked out over the valley and couldn't see more than a couple blocks. It… Continue reading The Daily: 19 July 2023
Having water destroy much of the state you live in —taking not the biblical 40 days to wreak havoc, but something like 8 hours — makes one rather conscious of adaptions that might be made to one's living arrangements. It's not good enough to clean up the mess and put it all back how it… Continue reading The Daily: 14 July 2023
Central Vermont is in disaster rehabilitation mode after things decidedly fell apart on Monday. There are tubes snaking out of buildings, draining basements of water. Belongings are being corralled and cleaned. Trash and irreparably broken things are filling up bins. Front loaders are scooping up tons of mud and gravel from the roads, and trucks… Continue reading The Daily: 13 July 2023
Today is Julius Caesar's birthday and the reason we call this month July. Then August? His heir... I prefer the Moon of the Flowers and the Nutting Moon and the Cold Moon. And of course the Wolf Moon. I think names matter. I think words matter. These are the ways we see the world and,… Continue reading The Daily: 12 July 2023
The Weather Well, today is a fun example of the new normal... Vermont is under flash flood warnings for the next 24 hours. Yes, that is all of Vermont. Many towns are being evacuated. Yes, whole towns. My garage had 3 inches of standing water this morning. It got up to about 5 inches before… Continue reading The Daily: 11 July 2023
On the Existence of Independence (A repost for the 4th) It is early July. In my country, we set fire to gunpowder and other explosives wrapped in paper — which are produced almost entirely in extremely hazardous conditions outside of this country — to mimic the actual gunpowder explosions that presumably were the background for… Continue reading The Daily: 4 July 2023
In Vermont, spring is the season of governance. Town Meetings happen in early March. These are usually followed by referenda and voting sessions to approve or shoot down the the more complicated ideas debated in the Meetings. Voting in many towns is often centered on school budgets, though there is also discussion of what to… Continue reading The Daily: 30 June 2023
I had a letter from a young reader last week, asking what I thought about concrete steps that we might be taking in place of what passes for activism in our present culture. It's a good question to ask, though I can't say that I'm the expert. Then again, maybe nobody is. Maybe there is… Continue reading The Daily: 27 June 2023
This past week I was reading an older book on the trauma of living within our culture and had another run-in with the theory that everything went to hell when humanity decided to farm. This book is old enough that the arguments against agriculture were still novel when it was written, so I forgave the… Continue reading The Daily: 26 June 2023
Summer Solstice Today is the solstice; today, the sun stands still. Well, actually, if you've read much of anything I've written, you know that it's been standing still for a few days now, and it will continue to do so for a few more days. From 17 June to 25 June, day length is 15… Continue reading The Daily: 21 June 2023
By My Solitary Hearth 