At the mouth of the Winooski River

I purposefully did not shake the Egyptian sand out of my sneakers, and that Nile-fed silt got mixed with Atlantic sand from strolling along the Cape Cod National Seashore and now my sneakers are brimming over with the Lake Champlain sand. I gotta empty them out, they're starting to hurt. Here's a couple of pictures from our current home at the mouth of the Winooski River on Lake Champlain. This is the river of my birth nearly 56 years ago in Marshfield, Vermont. This summer Andy and I plan to canoe the 90 mile length of it though we will need some help for the reach above Plainfield because rapids pose a challenge that is beyond our skill... (any good stern men/women out there want to join us?)

I seem to be drawn back and back to roots long deserted (I thought!). In our search to find "home" we seem to return to Vermont though without the fixed emblems of that concept - like a house, a work, even a community (whatever that term means!). We tend the enduring relationships that gave birth to our sense of ourselves ... I'm referring here to the Buddhist idea that the "self" is not a fixed thing so much as a web of relationships. Perhaps we are at heart, who we love... Then our ever-so-important-essential-selves must also include the land we have loved/been loved by, the river that soothed a lost first love, the climbing trees and snow tunnels, the gardens we have tended and the meadows and forests we have wandered - surely they have left their mark on the soul of our being...