Marooned in Vermont
Bob and Beth Gross left Swarthmore for Vermont in February. Photo: Rachel Gross
Sometimes I remember our Queen Anne, built on a corner in Swarthmore in the 1890s. But now that I’ve been in Hartland, Vermont, for nearly five months, marooned by COVID-19, I often forget all about the house.
Because the houses in Pennsylvania and Vermont are so different, I feel as if I have two separate lives. Our Swarthmore home doesn’t have a single plumb floor. Drop a marble in any room, and it seeks a corner. The furniture and art — much of it inherited from our parents and my husband Bob’s aunt — tend to be antique, heavy, and clunky. The living room is dark most of the day.
On February 26, Bob and I drove north for 7.5 hours, including rest stops and lunch, to see our 17-year-old granddaughter perform in “Grease.” She got sick, however, and never made it onstage. Then her mother developed fatigue and a persistent dry cough. Next, Bob got a fever and a bad cold that lasted a week. Finally, I caught his cold.
By this time, it was mid-March. Our older daughter in Seattle, then a COVID epicenter, persuaded us — her “vulnerable” septuagenarian parents — to remain in our 50-year-old vacation house.
We bought the land in Vermont in 1969. Designed by the same architectural firm that created Sea Ranch in Sonoma County, California, the 1,000-square-foot house is clad in cedar, the interior walls have cutouts, and the kitchen ceiling is 26 feet high. We overlook a 3-acre meadow on one end, and woods, crisscrossed with old logging trails, surround the other sides. The furniture is 20th century modern: red-orange knock-off Eames chairs, a table Bob built decades ago, and items from Ikea’s Malm line. White walls make the interior cheerful and bright. Nearly everything hanging on those walls was created by living relatives.
Our younger daughter and her family live a few miles away. All spring they shopped for us and dropped the groceries outside our door. We sat at the windows, binoculars in hand, waiting for wildlife to parade across the field. The Vermont snows didn’t recede until mid-April, but we were here to see the flowers bloom in the meadow. We’d never seen that before.
In addition to herds of deer, a behemoth snapping turtle lumbered across the meadow and plopped into our pond. Wild turkeys, breast to breast, fanned their tails into perfect half circles as a prelude to war or sex. Peeking into a nest on our porch, I saw six tiny white eggs. Only two phoebes, nearly as large as their parents, hatched and took wobbly first flights.
A midnight photo revealed that the huge bald spots and deep scratches on our house’s siding were made by a plump porcupine gnawing away for salt. From the neighbor across our dirt road, whose parents sold us our land long ago, we discovered that 40 sheep attended by a llama shepherd lived nearby. Who knew? One day the llama went on the lam, came crashing through our woods, and was retrieved. Coincidentally, I just had been reading about llama blood as a possible source of virus antibodies.
I very much miss our Swarthmore friends. However, we socialize with the multi-aged residents of Clay Hill Road. Masked and socially distanced, we held a pandemic picnic in our meadow. One warm night, we saw the film “Back to the Future” projected onto a sheet on our neighbors’ barn wall. We also hosted a rock-skipping party, mostly for the local kids. Our small pond produced a winner with seven skips. The snapper never surfaced.
I don’t leave out-of-season clothing in Hartland because my wardrobe is too sparse. When the warm weather arrived, my granddaughter and daughter left hand-me-down shorts and tees at our door. Amazon provided sandals.
In the 50 years we have been vacationing in Vermont, we have had no TV in the house. Last Christmas, we purchased our first, so that we’d be able to watch pre-election news this summer: an example of extreme serendipity. So, after dinner most nights, we spend time in Scandinavia, Wales, Israel, and Australia, watching political thrillers and police procedurals. The news? We read it solely online.
Thanks to Zoom, we had a virtual Seder on April 8 with both our daughters’ families. Our oldest granddaughter, sent home early from Oberlin College due to COVID, celebrated her 20th birthday that day. Also on April 8, we condoled with our nearby neighbor whose father died of the virus midday. When he was on the ventilator, his Long Island doctor had administered hydroxychloroquine.
I dread the coming winter and I find myself thinking increasingly often of our Swarthmore Queen Anne. But how to get there? I recently read with avidity a Slate article rating portable urinals for women. What’s a woman to do if she shuns germy public restrooms but wants to go home? I know: first world problems.
Beth Gross is the former editor of the Swarthmorean.
