Happy New Year

Happy New Year

From the dark cold northeast US

Where I'll dream of apple blossoms tonight.

The cold winds howling

and snow flakes drifting, shifting in the moonless cloudy night.

That only means it's warmer

and the blue moon won't be seen

making it an even rarer occurence to enjoy.

Meanwhile the town still has not responded

to my requests to see what led them to want to sell my property

without even stopping by and telling me

I suppose I can call last year a decade ago,

Can I say it took them a decade to address my concerns?

I might be satisfied if they said they would never do this again to another person, another woman, another

woman person with or without MS.

But they will not.

Will they force me to seek "legal remedy" that as I said before is an

oxymoron.

They have let me go on long enough to publish it in this, my journal haven

read by friends I admire

and I hope entertain in some way.

Now share my hope that the town will snap out of their obstinate defiance to let me know

why were they taking my property?

why don't they think this is a big deal?

how will they stop this behavior?

I will not ask why they might hate me because a friend told me a Lakota truth

that anything you pay attention to gets bigger,

I decided I should pay attention to having a wonderful 2010 for my friends and I.

I will focus on resolving hateful behaviors by sludging through the bureaucracy.

I will send out happy thoughts to all you who read my blog and those who despise me as well.

What could it hurt?

Mary Gerdt, Monkton, Vermont 12.31.2009

Do you think you have had a hard life?

This postcard is by Ellen Clapsaddle artist and entrepreneur.

I know you have had a hard life.

As Levon Helm sings "You got to move a long train."

How do I know?

Because you read to find the truth, you travel the world wide web of words

for

answers.

We found these 100 year old old postcards somewhere and I looked up the artist.

Ellen, according to accounts on the web, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

She was doing this captivating art for card companies. She ended up in Germany and was probably on the verge of being more successful in creating and selling cards. She had a partner in New York. A well travelled woman of early 1900's. World War 1 broke out and she was caught up in who knows what?

She was lost, no one heard from her. Her partner found her 6 years later in bad shape. She died in a mental institution where she played with dolls. This postcard haunted me. Such a playful artist.

I think of Ellen when  think I am having a hard day. What did she do to survive? Could I have?

Hope you have a brighter day thinking of Ellen.

Winter Wonderland

The lake evaporates as it cools and it came down in fluffy flakes and covered all the dirt, brown and gray with a bright white blanket of snow.
This afternoon, Santa brought us the Carolyn Wonderland World Tour poster.
Very impressive print and we will look for a frame.
We have been cranking her CD Miss Understood and one we got from amazon.
Great Christmas music, our chosen holiday of the darkness, Carolyn's voice and music shining through for us.
Ok I said she sounded like Janis Joplin and Stevie Ray Vaughn, but now as we get into her other music, we find layers upon layers of genre, styles, pieces of the whole that is unique to herself, Her music truly is one Carolyn Wonderland!
Hey, order some of her music, (& poster), you will not be disappointed.
carolynwonderland.com
Goes great by the tree and fire in chilly Vermont.
Merry Christmas, Mary

A letter to Congress

I wrote this letter tonight to congressional delegates from Vermont.
I anticipate flak from some direction but I have ripened to an age where I could give a damn.

"Please vote no on this bill. I favor an approach that involves all clients and health care workers, not lawyers and actuaries. Do not force me to pay in a new direction. I have MS and am happy with my current system. Don't mess up a good thing. Focus on what's broke and stop playing with my healthcare with making deals for votes.Stop pretending you can save medicare dollars. People do and always will get sick and that costs money. Don't be labelled as the congress who spent all my grandchildren's money."


don't hate me because I am a nurse with 30 years experience from bedside nursing to the inner financial ugliness of the sick body business. let's not delude ourselves into thinking politicians have the ability to reform a system as complex as the nebulae the Hubble spies on. greetings from NW Monkton.
Mary Gerdt, health care consumer, coordinator and advocate of more common sense and less politics

A numbers game

We are headed towards one high numbers holiday. We want to spend spend or maybe not depending on our beliefs and how we have adopted or changed them.
Numbers likewise serve as a guide in our lives as my brother Paul said.
I see certain sequences like a beacon at times and a comfort at others.
A warning is the absence of those numbers, a wrong turn.
2010 is coming and a decade into the new millennium. Do you feel all modern?
Can you even keep up? If you saw a sign, would you know it?
The days will get longer from here until June, a hopeful sign for the next 6 months.
Watch for your numbers.
You will know what I mean.
Mary

Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice is only a day away.
We picked out our Christmas tree: a full squat scotch pine that sucked up water and looked better afterwards.
Now I feel the celebration has begun for us in the season of darkness back to light.
Did our ancestors wonder if it would get light again?
Do we?
Happy Solstice. Hope is just around the corner.
Guess we dodged the snow but also have quickly adapted to the winter and now have the feeling that 20 degrees is balmy. It has been bitter cold.
We sailed across the lake Champlain yesterday on the ferry. The seas were a little rough and exciting feeling. We could see where the powerful arctic cold air formed a line with the outer fringes of the southeastern snow delluge.
We got a break from snow but are burning more fuel.
Hope you all have a great week in your celebration of light.
Mary

Near Land Grab in Vermont

Now did I get your attention???
Read the post just below again.
They almost took my property for bobcats and just hating us and I received a few comments by those scarred enough to believe it. Otherwise benign in resonance after being sent out to the web.

That is why this story is stranger than fiction, could happen to you and
a heinous breach of humanity.
Or is it a mere illustration that evolution failed to take the ape out of humans?

Mary Gerdt, Monkton Vermont

Intro and a poem

Herrad gave me a wonderful award which I am grateful for.
Today, I was again trying to make sense of a process where the Town of Monkton tried to sell my property and I still have never seen the paperwork or the notes of why us?
I even asked the "Addy Indy" for a copy of whatever legal notice was allegedly posted in the pay version of the paper (I read the online) that some residents saw but I still have not received it or seen it.
So in the absence of real info, my imagination runs wild, knowing a few facts
Like the conservation committee minutes were talking about tax sales.
The town did not post minutes on the website (even if they don't have to),
The fact that there is a website leads me to think of that as a way to communicate.
When I saw "tax sale" in the minutes I had no idea it was me.
Apparently, I as the female co owner of a property must rely on my husband to tell me the bad news.
When friends have said they know of many couples who might fall victim to this fate.
That the Male landowner/husband is all the town needed to tell. Fair warning to all you "minor" AKA "Chattell" landowners.With gay marriage legal now, I wondered who the husband might be?
Apparently being 9 months late on property taxes can be soon enough for the town to sell your property, especially if it abuts some natural area.
So I thought I would get this out of my system well before my holiday of Christmas.
It is my way of processing what the 1st ammendment allows me to name "eco terrorism".

I am.

I am an endangered species,

A human seeking shelter, food, happiness.



Finding instead the hate of human beings as unpalatable as a deer finds a rotten acorn and spits it out.

I wish I could spit out all the hate that has come my way.



People are funny about wanting to save bobcats and ravens and bats

While ignoring the people who live on this property that our ancestors fought for

And paid for

Over and over again with taxes, blood, sweat and tears.



Yes the bobcat has an ally,

The bobcat I saw one morning a year or so ago,

Thinking maybe he was looking out for me, the

Endangered human. He took my breath away, this simple creature.

The ravens or crows or I call them Prussian eagles of my fantasy world

Call to me, click, crow and fly over with the whooshing sound of their wings, telling me perhaps,

"Welcome home", hoping I will stay because they like our leftover stale bread and bits of fat

And conversation as We greet Pa Crow in the morning, like my Celtic friend advised.



Could any of the screaming conservationists come and hug me,

Not my trees

And talk to the crows, not ravens, and call the

Mountain its first given name? *



I have felt like the people around me feel I have no right to something I work every day to hang onto,

Until some one finds a way to take it from me,

And perhaps that will be a good time for me to go extinct,

Knowing there will be no one to argue that

"She had a right to live here like the bobcat, crows, bats and the Prussian eagles."



God help the people who lurk about and cannot face my face and talk to me.

God help the people who want to take from me the only things I have ever owned.

God help the people who place animals above citizens,

Trees above the people who own and love them,

Bobcats over my grandchildren

Land over civility.

Fair warning to others in my situation.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Dean Mountain
  Dean's Cave

02/12/11. update.
I still have not received anything from the town explaining to me what the process was
whereby they decided to sell my property. I own 2 parcels.
I still have received nothing from the addy indy as I requested a copy of what was in their pay newspaper,
I feel is not public it is private when they charge money.
I still have not received more than a sorry so sad letter from all the entities I have written.
I consulted an attorney who advised me it costs a lot to go against city hall and that the
parties who orchestrated this will lie and never "break down on the stand like a Perry Mason show"
I know the court system now. It is a hostile environ. All I can do now is keep writing about Vermont's dirty secret. In fact, just google Vt property tax lien sales and find out how you too can cash in on the foreclosure of property by local municipalities to pay education and municipal taxes. mary gerdt, monkton, vt

Winter Travel

We went to the other side of the state for an office meeting and secret santa "yankee swap".
I am thankful not to drive over the mountains and Fred did the honors.
We took 89 across by Montpelier, the capital and then by Barre, granite capital and home to many beautiful public sculptures Italian craftsmen have made over the years.
Then onto 302 east. You can actually see all this on google earth. It is a meandering paved road that goes by evergeen stands, logging sites, used car dealers...a lot of them for such a remote area.
On to South Ryegate which is in a cozy nook of mountains, moose, bear and today about a foot of snow or so, packed down by the above freezing temps.
We were so lucky the weather stayed above freezing, even a little above and the roads were not icy yet. Tonight a cold blast that really starts the first stages of cold winter, albeit above zero.
Hope you stay warm wherever you are.
Mary

Pictures of other Galaxies

Every Day a new image appears on my website
of Space scenes, dust clouds, intimate views
of far far away places.
Travel there through the pictures captured
by the Hubble and other astronomers, photographers.
Sometimes I just sit and stare for a second,
Grateful my taxes went to something
Captivatingly beautiful and for a reassurance
Man is a but tiny piece
of the whole and yet
What an unusual place we are all at,
After "evolution" as some believe
and before the day when it all blows up or inplodes
or vanishes and leaves a tiny
hard
heavy
fragment
and begin the process all over again.
mary

We recommend Carolyn Wonderland and Guy Forsyth for Christmas

We Recommend

Carolyn Wonderland and Guy Forsyth.

Great music, blends of perfection.
Their radio interview on Carolyn's facebook we follow.

Here is her website
http://www.carolynwonderland.com/

and Guy Forsyth's

http://guyforsyth.com/

Have a great musical journey.
Mary

Time

Time

Time, I told you has no beginning, no end,


An illusion we teach our children, an illusion

We convince ourselves.

So our linear thinking side of our brains will feel like,

There, all done, or Got through that or has not happened yet

Or I do not have the TIME.

This is a good month to bring this up since most humans feel pressure

This time of year to buy, give, spend or otherwise celebrate the season

Of darkness for the northern hemisphere dwellers.

This is not intended to make your hair hurt or your brain to freeze up, but it might.

This is not intended to tell you something to irritate you or anger you, but it might.

This is not even intended to distract you from your stressed out life.



This is to give you another perspective, a change of viewpoint, a way to see the world in a fresh light.

A world without Time.

No minutes, hours, days. No getting through something.

As I write this I watch the clock, ready to finish, and hope to post tonight.

Will I have time?

Periwinkle Blue

Outer space travel will require blankets.
It is cold out there.
And the evolution of fabrics and plastic bottle recycling has brought us to Flurr.
see fleece4sale.com
fleece4sale.com

This is about my periwinkle flurr blanket and why I question evolution.
Why did we ever give up sleeping on fur?

Periwinkle Blue


It is the color of the Earth from the shuttle or the moon. It is the color of

The blanket I made from flurr, this spun fleece fabric that is so warm we do not need the electric blanket.

I wanted to tell you my thoughts about a fabric meant to resemble

Fur, and that is so soft, warm and wonderful I want to tell everyone on the planet.

If man evolved from some cave dwelling Neanderthals, I assume with some hesitation that that means Man got smarter as time went on (even though I told you before there is no beginning and end of time).

I hesitate because to evolve beyond using fur as a blanket is not evolution to me.
Those cotton thermal blankets, poly blankets that get “pilly”, sheets, etc. They are all less than fur.

Now there is a glimmer of hope as man has created synthetic fur from plastic soda bottles. Spun garbage so to speak. Don't worry, the processing removes the icky stuff.
Don't use fabric softener (actually liquid wax with perfume), or high heat.
Tack pieces of fleece over drafty windows or doors.
I tested the temperature in the sunny window-behind the fleece it was 5-10 degrees warmer.

So evolve, again?
Get some flurr. You don't have to even bind the edges except if you are visually needy.
I told you before, it is space age fabric and what I will cover up with as we zoom by Mars on out of this solar system.
Mary

Black birds they flock

The days get shorter, the light fades away


My heart is beating another day.

Black birds they flock,

They caw from tree tops

And fly in swirling

Patterns

What do they speak about?

On our 25th wedding anniversary I looked up and saw 25 crows,
Then more joined until I could not count anymore.

They flew in a swarm, a graceful organized chaotic swarm.

Did they do that knowing I was watching?

mary