Downward slope

Katydid, aka bush cricket

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Even with all the rain we’ve had, a few leaves on the plane trees are browning and falling off, and the weeds and ivy are growing a tad more slowly these days.  Seeds are gaining prominence over flowers. And yet the woods and suburban roadsides still resemble  very green jungle so thick that it seems hard to believe that autumn freezes will wither it  into a dead brown.

In the evening we’re hearing the first choruses of katydids, especially loud at the end of hot days, and there’s the slight dimming of the afternoon light compared to a week or two ago. Soon will come the back-to-school ads. And friends in Vermont have been touting the fall foliage in the Taconic Range.

Children in Chicago surround an ice cream vendor in 1909.

Summer is the time of  good goo: Ice-cream cones drip onto your chin; hot-dog mustard  turns your face and hands an unsightly yellow; corn-on-the-cob butter slicks up the table; popsicles melt onto your sticky hands as you try to finish them before they turn completely into liquid.  And that fading favorite of kids at summer county fairs and amusement parks -- cotton candy, instant diabetes!

Messy but happy experiences.

'To rescue it from the future'

“Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on… places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills… a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.”

― Rebecca McNutt in her novel Smog City. Alford is in the Taconic Range, which are lumped with the Berkshires (Hill or Mountains.

In the Taconic Range of far western Massachusetts

— Photo by Ericshawwhite

Police brutality

“Expired Meter’’ (oil on board) by George Hughes (1907-1990), at the National Museum of American Illustration, Newport

(c) 2020 National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, RI, and the American Illustrators Gallery, New York, NY

Mr. Hughes lived for the last part of his life in Arlington. Vt., between the Taconic Range and the southern Green Mountains, where one of his neighbors for some years was the far more famous illustrator Norman Rockwell, who eventually moved to Stockbridge, Mass., in the Berkshires.

Fog over the Battenkill River in West Arlington, Vt.

'Basic problem of human conduct'

"Vermont tradition is based on the idea that group life should leave each person as free as possible to arrange his own life. This freedom is the only climate in which (we feel) a human being may create his own happiness. ... Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by.''

-- Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958)

Mrs.  Fisher was an education reformer, social activist and best-selling author. She was originally from Kansas but eventually moved to Vermont, which she loved. She died in Arlington, Vt., in the gorgeous valley between the Green Mountains and the Taconic Range. (See pictures below.) She became a luminary of the Green Mountain State and was the first woman to be awarded an honorary degree by Dartmouth College (across the Connecticut in New Hampshire).

At the Vermont State House, in Montpelier (the smallest state capital, but considered hip).

Sleepy downtown Arlington, in southwestern Vermont. In the summer, the area swarms with vacationing and weekending New Yorkers bearing much appreciated cash and credit cards to be used at the area's many inns, restaurants and expensive shops.

The Taconic Range.