Markers...

Nelson married us on June 25. He and his wife Betti are painters, musicians, teachers, gardeners and good friends. They stopped by when they saw my laundry on the line. (That's one of the ways people know that you are at home in a small rural town...that, and spotting your car in the driveway, and footsteps in new snow.)

We chatted at the patio table. We reset the chairs that Emmett and Kerstin had stowed in the garage before the storm, with the plants and the garden chaise and an assortment of pots and garden tools. We reviewed what we knew of the water damage. The culvert in the Tinmouth Channel had held despite a churning that no one alive remembered having seen. "Worse than the floods in '27," some of the elders had said.

"Want to join us for the dinner club?" they asked. Wednesday nights at the Tinmouth Snack Bar. 5:30.

In a city, there would be hundreds of choices. And no one meets for dinner at 5:30.

In Tinmouth, as in Middletown, there is only one choice.

The Tinmouth Snack Bar is a simple place with  about ten tables. There is a long ramp to the front door, and everyone uses that one door unless you want ice cream from the long window on the front. Our friend Emmett has his Vermont photos hanging on the walls. The daughters of local families serve the meals. They are shy and friendly and a bit awkward, but there is the sense that this is a good job, and the money will help them defray the cost of college or a used car, or an apartment of their own. The menu is small town diner fare-- burgers and fried fish and turkey dinners, though Tina has two vegetarian options and a chef salad with garden lettuces and dried cranberries on her specials menu. We drank her  iced tea and lemonade combination and had ice cream from one of the great Vermont ice cream companies. Ruth had homemade zucchini bread and we talked about making sure that you don't leave your car unlocked lest there be an orphaned box of squash in the back seat when you return.

Nothing happens quickly here, so customers chat and laugh, and catch up on the local news.

The "dinner club" was sparse-- Nelson and Betti and their friend Ruth who works in the town office two days a week and is the librarian (yes, Tinmouth which has a population of 633 has its own library. And its own paper.). Ruth's husband Bob, braved the rerouting of roads to go to a birthday party for someone who has a business selling free range turkeys in a town about an hour north. No one knew where Betti's brother Grant and his wife, Jo were. They're regulars.

"Got through, ok?"

One couple lost more to the hail storm a week before the Hurricane. They lost 120 onions that were flattened and their apples were downed, and the siding needs to be replaced as it is dented from the hail. Tina lives three doors away and had no hail. Someone else photographed it --hands held apart about six inches to show the depth of the pile up against the house. "She knew no one would believe her, so she took a picture."

Everyone knew about the severing of roads. Everyone knew that Rt. 103 was back in order. We talked about how H could get here from Boston on the weekend. "Through Springfield probably. Is Chester still out?"

And then Kevin R. arrived. He's a local contractor. He's been working on the hole in Rt. 4 in Mendon. "We're picking up gravel in Florence. Dumping it at the top and working our way down. The hole's 30 feet deep. There were hundreds at the resort in Killington. Couldn't get out. They're escorting them down in the hole on a track no wider than a dump truck, and back up the other side. Every morning. They're looking for a skidder to take out the trees. Saying it's three weeks worth of trees. They'll have two dirt lanes going by the hole in a month. No paving. No asphalt."

We sat quietly, asking questions from time to time. He seemed to want to talk. Maybe the need to get it all out. Maybe part of living in Vermont. We like to talk when there's someone to listen.

"Sewer line's out. Emptying into the brook." Rutland had had excess capacity and so they extended the sewer line into Killington some years back. There would be some work to do fixing that. "Pipe's coming from Pennsylvania."

Betti and Nelson and I had been talking about the now defunct gourmet restaurant on Rt. 4 that had been up for sale for some months, maybe as much as a year. I had said they'd have a hard time finding a buyer now. "Hemingway's gone," Kevin said. "Just the top of the roof sticking up above a sink hole."

"Goodro Lumber's gone."

Tina started asking about whether her husband who works for the county water district could get up to Killington now. He had filled the water tower before the hurricane but it was probably about half empty now. And without power there wasn't much he could do to change that. And then somehow, as things will do, the conversation turned to the man who worked for the water district whose body had been found. He had gone up there with his son on Sunday. The son's body hasn't been found yet. Tina's husband Greg was always saying they needed to use safety equipment. She had dated the father in high school. They had broken up. There had been a marriage and a divorce, and then he had met his second wife. She was a friend of Tina's. Used to work together. She'd been married before. Split up. But when she met Mike..." Tina paused. "They were in love. Lost their other son about a year ago." He had been at a party and fell down the stairs. "Broke his neck."  He had been 25. The son who was still missing had been 29.

So once again, I search for a way to end this post... It's too easy to talk about the importance of understanding the real stories beneath the counts of deaths and businesses lost. It's too easy to write of the manner in which our lives turn on a dime.

Herb and I have been married 67 days. In that time, there has been a whole lot to absorb, figure out how to cope with, and as with the roads, we keep on, making detours at roads that are closed, finding a bridge across the mud and churning...