Staff Blog

As a (former) New Yorker, I’m well aware that a bagel is not your average bread. In Manhattan, there are several thousand bagel places to choose from, and each one makes their specialty a little differently. Everyone has an opinion on where to buy the best bagels — growing up, I spent countless hours in line on weekend mornings for a warm, freshly baked bagel, just around the corner from my apartment.

And while bagel snobbery seems to wane the further you get from New York City, sometimes you find warm, freshly baked bagels in the most unexpected places.

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After a mile of muddy ruts, the dirt road opened out onto a foggy clearing. There, in front of a small stream, sat the sugarhouse where all of the maple syrup for Steve’s Park Diner on Merchant’s Row in Middlebury is boiled down.

By Monday evening, last week’s sun and unseasonable warmth seemed like it had all been a dream, and after a day bundled in extra layers at the office, it was hard to think about going back outside.

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“Where are your kids from?”

When you are a pale-skinned mom with two brown-skinned children, you get asked this question on a surprisingly frequent basis in casual conversations in all kinds of settings. In adoption circles, we refer to these people as “supermarket strangers,” people who don’t know us or our children but ask rather invasive and personal questions without much preamble.

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While the snow cover is much improved from my last posting, the gorgeous spring-like weather could bring the ski season to an early close, so I had to get out over the weekend and enjoy the deep, but increasingly slushy snow. You will also notice something very different about this post. As a rule of thumb, I am usually a purist in that I earn my descents by putting out the effort to gain altitude first. But today, I felt that a lobster analogy was quite appropriate.

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