home again

We are home again. After three weeks of travel to New Orleans, Houston, the Eastern Townships, and Montreal, we have arrived back in Vermont to the cold, lean days of late November. This is a beautiful time of year here, but you have to look beyond the wash of browns and grays, and embrace the austere lines of the land, the naked branches and knarled trunks of the trees, the atmospheric low-light of the days and evenings. You have to watch for the magic of shooting stars across the November night sky.

Where to begin to write about this past month? New Orleans and her bright hope and blown-down past, slick, sophisticated Houston—no cow-town here folks, and snow-glad Quebec with wine routes and handmade cheeses, fatted ducks, hard cider. We would like to start chronologically, but somehow our rememberances of these places have situated themselves more like a collage with new narrative threads connecting us from point to point. So the next few weeks, and perhaps the next month, will be peppered with tales of the journey, along with the trials of growing winter greens, the barrel tasting and bottling of the wine, the tasting of the Christmas walnut liquer. In the meantime, fore more information on what's happening in New Orleans go visit the valiant www.neworleansladder.com.





--Deirdre and Caleb