This is a book with all the color and rhythm of the seasons of New England. Timeless and yet personal, universal and yet so local you recognize your neighbors, can count the logs in their woodpile, smell the smoke from chimneys on a sunny cold autumn day and savor the taste of last summer's raspberries.Life in the North Country, as folks call this part of New England, is hard. But people here have roots sunk deep into the land and into their small communities. Communities where elected representatives are the folks next door, and campaigns for town offices consist of standing up at town meeting and saying a few words. Villages and farms, main streets and meadows, woods and brooks, churches and barns, are strung together between the Green and White mountains by dirt roads and highways. Brightening predawn skies and lingering sunsets behind the hills, sudden storms, birdsong and animal tracks, sultry summers and frigid winters all inspire reflections on childhood memories, departures and returns, mournings and rejoicings.For a writer like Nessa Flax, the North Country of Vermont and New Hampshire is a storyteller's dream—every detail is spun into the yarn of stories celebrating a people and a landscape as she listens to the Voices in the Hills, weaving them into so many small pieces of glittering magic.
Nessa Flax was educated at Riverside City College, SUNY at Stony Brook and Dartmouth College, a member of the first graduating class of women in 1976. Her career includes selling motorcycles, teaching for 16 years, coaching fencing, management consulting and writing. She is now a columnist for the Journal Opinion, a local newspaper. Raised in suburban Virginia, Pennsylvania and California, the mountains and meadows of the North Country have now claimed her for their own.
Table of Contents
Foreword Cicely Richardson, former managing editor, Journal Opinion 7
Introduction 9
north country life 11
in the old house 31
transitions 197
at home in the woods 213
Afterword 297
Acknowledgments 299
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
"With a mellow, but sharp weather eye on colors, sounds, shifting seasons, dogs, and moose in the road at night, Nessa Flax sails beautifully through her own childhood in Virginia to her present life in upper Connecticut Valley. Vermont is the richer that she is here, is watching and is writing."- Willem Lange
"Nessa Flax shows us, teaches us, how much we can understand if we only take the time to pay attention to the world we inhabit. Whether it is the changing colors of fall, or the dedication to work of an older Vermonter in ways that seem wondrous to us now, she focuses her attention on the events in the life going on around us. Any reader of this book will understand more about Vermont – who lives here, and what our values are, and why we love our state – after spending some time with Nessa’s writing." –Senator Bernie Sanders
"Never take for granted the privilege of living and working in a small Vermont town. Neighbors, a shared stewardship of the land, and the changing seasons all keep us connected and humble.But there’s one other essential ingredient – a storyteller to bind us to our past and to nudge us into our future – someone to notice, to ask questions, to listen to the voices, and to sift out the essence of the stories. That’s what Nessa has done in this book." --Peggy Hewes, Baldwin Memorial Library (Wells River, Vermont)
