Back in Thetford.

8-22-10 VERMONT: We had an uneventful trip back from Quebec on Friday. Yesterday was pleasant after a cold, 45° Friday night. Judy switched us to flannel sheets on Saturday, the first sign of fall. Today, it’s pouring, no wind or electricity, just teeming rain overnight and all morning. Oh yes, there was 0.7 inches in the rain gauge when we got back.

Yesterday morning we went to another country auction, which marked the end of the line for another family. There were horse drawn sleighs and a surrey with a fringed top, a sixties cadillac in peeling red paint, a ski-doo, wood cook stoves, medical equipment from, i’m guessing, the 1920’s, leather bound hymnals from the early 1800’s, modern paperbacks, all the usual glasses and china, old clothes, boxes full of buttons, farm equipment, rugs, furniture—old, new and some homemade. It’s two hundred years of lives all for sale in an afternoon.


Snow Travel, from different centuries.

In my afternoon I started splitting the wood we found neatly stacked in the driveway on our return, less than half a cord. Chippers, the arborists, had been here while we were away and taken down some large branches that were hanging over the gardens and house. After a bit of that I did some more work on the flower bed that I’m clearing for the herbs. An entrenched, established flower bed is tough to clear if you’re trying to save the plants. I moved some of the iris to pond side by the rock ledge.

New blooms: another clematis, turtlehead.


Clematis on the north end of the deck.

Clematis on the south end of the deck, the other white stuff is phlox.