Things to Do Here

I had fondly deluded myself that I was going to get back on my regular writing schedule, but I am still on vacation, with the additional welcome distraction of a very dear friend who is paying us a four day visit in our little Adirondack cottage.  Before she arrived, I drew up a list entitled Things to Do Here and we've gotten to about a third of them.  As we toddle about, spending money like drunken sailors at the tag sales, immersing ourselves in icy mountain streams, and eating far too many local delicacies (the cider donuts! the Maple Creemies! Daily Chocolate in Vergennes!) I console myself with the assurance that, after my friend leaves, John Wirenius' Phineas at Bay will show up on the dining porch (it's the country, you see - nobody steals your unattended mail, and parcels are simply dropped off wherever their owner is most likely to see them, and where they won't get soaked in case an unexpected mountain thunderstorm comes along) and I will have the pleasure of reading it for the fourth time and then writing a well-thought-out, profound, witty review, all the while stroking the pretty white pages and emitting little coos of delight about the fact that it's a really, truly, honest-to-goodness book, made out of really, truly, honest-to-goodness paper.  (But don't let me stop you from ordering the e-book, if that's how you roll.)

So what are some of the things we have done up here?

Well, the first day was given over the the activity known in our family as Vermonting.  In other words, we transported a female who is over the age of consent across state lines, forcing her to binge on the aforementioned cider donuts while still in New York State by emitting shrieks of, "Look, look, there's Gunnison Orchards, we have to stop!" careening into the parking lot, and tumbling out of the car like Eliot Ness in pursuit of Al Capone.  I mean, the donuts are that kind of good.  I go for the plain ones, although they have fancy, too.  This year, they got a little silly and added maple-frosted donuts with crumbled bacon on top, thus getting on the "put a little bacon on everything that used to get cilantro/wasabi/black pepper on it and charge 30% more" bandwagon.  But as far as I'm concerned, this is what is known in musician parlance as "gilding the turd."  The plain cider donuts are so exquisitely perfect that to bedizen them with anything at all  - even a dusting of cinnamon sugar - strikes me as being the sort of bad idea endorsed by those who waste their time embroidering brocade.  The plain donuts are masterfully restrained as to their sweetness, tender to the tooth, and reveal a moist, yielding  interior after crunching through a superb surface crispiness.  They do not travel well, and must be consumed within an hour or two of purchase.  On a good day, they last that long, but most of the time we just gobble them up while we're still standing in line to pay. There's always a line, because everybody knows about Gunnison Orchards and their cider donuts.  The fruit pies are pretty damn good, too, but we didn't want to be piggy.

As we all know, eating sugar initiates the phenomenon of craving more sugar, until you are finally so bloated and sated that you crash hard and start behaving like a cranky toddler in need of a nap.  Luckily for everybody's sunny disposition, the next stop was Daily Chocolate in Vergennes.  For this, we had to cross the recently built bridge from Crown Point, NY to West Addison, VT. It's a beautiful bridge, and the second you're across it you realize that Vermont is different from New York.  You're still in farm country, but it's somehow lusher, greener, and, in addition, prosperous-looking in that discreet way that Old Money is prosperous-looking.  Which is not to say that all Vermont farmers are rich - far from it.  It's the land itself that is rich, and it doesn't hurt that the earth is lovingly curated by those who farm it.  New York Adirondack soil (as I can testify, having coaxed a pocket-handkerchief-sized Schroon Lake flower garden into existence) is chock-full of rocks and varies wildly in its quality - all the darkest, loamiest dirt seems to be lurking sullenly under thick copses of underbrush that dare you to chop them down and make anything of them.  There's a wildness to the New York farmland that never seems to quite be tamed; there's always a sense that Nature is just waiting to leap on those hard-wrested cornfields and turn them back into pine land.

But Vermont land seems to purr under the plow like a sleek, well-fed kitten being stroked by a gentle hand.  No mater where you go - the farmers have made it look easy.  Like the land just naturally got that way.

Vergennes is one of those postcard-pretty New England towns that seems too good to be possible.  Daily Chocolate is a tiny basement-level shop tucked into a tiny side street off Main Street.  (The main street really IS Main Street, and once you've rolled through that, you're back in farmland.)  When you walk into the shop, the aroma of high-quality hand-dipped chocolate grabs you by the nose and marches you to the counter, where you swiftly find yourself in a trance of greed, trying not to drool on the glass display case as you point at things and say, "I'll have the pistachio-chili bark...dark, I think...oooh, and some of the Delight bars, the ones with the coconut, please...one of the pine nut-caramel dark chocolates - no, make that two - umm, some of those ginger-orange ones... I forget, how many pieces of the English toffee did we get last time?"  Then you pretend you're buying it as a present for your aged aunt in Brooklyn, but you aren't fooling anybody, because all the while you've been surreptitiously noshing on the little plate of broken-up chocolate samples that include white chocolate with lavender infusion, until, to your dismay, you find that you've eaten it all while you were pointing at things in the case, which embarrasses you so much that you order a few more things, just to make it up to the nice lady behind the counter who has been patiently waiting for you to finish your impulse-buying.

We each ate a little more chocolate, and were about to drive off, when the two females in the car (myself and our guest) set up a clamor for my husband to stop, stop, stop, there's a farmer's market on the Village Square!  Being the soul of resigned indulgence, he managed to find a parking spot, and we happily bounced off to look at more food.  This time there were actually a few healthy things, and, since we were already stuffed with goodies, we were able to salve our consciences by buying sungold tomatoes and local cukes. There was also a man who made intricate and detailed hand puppets out of plastic cups, construction paper, and a bit of string; since he was selling such creations as a unicorn, a pink cow, and a lion with puffy cotton cheeks at a dollar apiece, I picked up a few to bring back and give to the arts & crafts counselor at our summer community's children's day camp, figuring that they would be a treasure on rainy days and the kids could use them as prototypes to try and make their own puppets.

At last we continued to our stated (non-food) destination - the Shelburne Museum.

Now, I have been to the Shelburne half a dozen times, or maybe more, and have never yet managed to see all of it.  Partly this is because it's the country estate of the immensely wealthy Electra Havemeyer  Webb.  If you've ever been to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, you may recall that there is an entire wing named after the Havemeyers, and that their name is carved into the marble across the top of the entrance.  I'm talking ridiculously, ludicrously, insanely, top-one-percent-of-the-one-percent rich.  As my friend Corinne once muttered, as we gazed upon the Lauder collection at the Neue Gallery - "Nobody should have this much money."

When my son was small and first learning to talk, he used to point at objects that caught his fancy and plead, "Have-a-dat! Have-a-dat!"

I think Electra Havemeyer should really have been called "Electra Have-a-Dat."  If she saw it and she liked it - she bought it, simple as that.  And since she had 45  acres to put it on, she never worried too much about storage space.

There you'll be, walking along the rolling green fields, cresting a hill, and suddenly you're looking at a lighthouse that seems to be warning the steamboat Ticonderoga not to crash into that grove of trees on its right.  The steamboat is up on cinder blocks, in a bizarre twist on those trashy neighbors who used to have half a dozen rusted-out cars up on cinder blocks in their junk-strewn driveway.  The steamboat is beautiful, with gleaming polished wood, with perfectly restored everything, and the floury-looking ersatz rolls and lustrous, shiny fake cherry pies arrayed on the table of the little below-deck kitchen were so real-looking that I poked a surreptitious finger into one to see whether I could pull out a plum.  It's the Collyer Brothers, all right, but it's Collyer Brothers who are willing to throw around some money.

Another thing Electra (and you have to wonder - why would any mother want to name her daughter Electra?) couldn't bear to give up was her Park Avenue apartment, and the five Monet paintings in it.  So, she didn't.  She had the whole thing dismantled, shipped, and reassembled in a house that she ordered custom-built to put it all in.  Did I mention that she was born with a full set of Louis Comfort Tiffany silverware in her mouth?  And that each hand-turned piece has a different image - a beetle, a butterfly, a ladybug - on the handle? And that it's in the Breakfast Room, along with the Tiffany tables and the hand-painted Japanese wallpaper?

It's a great way to spend an afternoon, and you never run out of lovely things to look at.  Far too soon, the helpful and courteous guard/docents are telling you that the museum is closing and they want to go home, so off you go, still having seen only a fraction of the Have-a-Dat Estate.  We managed to see a magnificent temporary exhibition of French Impressionists, as well as some truly impressive quilts (don't laugh - they are hand-made and represent thousands of hours of painstaking stitchery.)

After all that walking, of course we were hungry again.

So we went to Burlington, because that's where A Single Pebble, arguably the best Chinese restaurant in the Northeast, is.  We have been going to A Single Pebble at least once a year since we were first introduced to it, and it never disappoints.  The mock eel!  The dry-fried green beans!  The Ants-Climbing-a-Tree!  It's perfectly amazing cuisine, and it's always our destination when we have a guest with a discerning palate.  Since this particular guest is an Upper West Sider from way back, she knows her food.

So we drove the long, long way home, and crashed out in food comas, and nobody got up until very late the next morning, and the dog was simply furious with the lot of us for staying out late and coming home smelling of food that she'd never gotten a chance to beg for, even though I'd hired a dog walker to take care of her and give her supper at six, just as she's used to.  So she pooped in the house to punish us, but her aim was bad and it landed on the linoleum instead of on the braided rug I'd bought at a tag sale.  And that's why my homework is so late.