Settings: ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/50 sec, 50mm lens

This is a photo of my cousin Ronnie’s windowsill in Ripton, Vermont.  I love these little faces – they have so much personality! We went to visit Ronnie yesterday before enjoying the epic dinner that I wrote about in my last post.  I hadn’t been to her home since I was about ten years old.

Ronnie is a totally cool and unique person.  Once upon a time she lived in NYC.  Now she lives here:

It’s so peaceful and beautiful out at her house in Vermont… and the air smells so clean and sweet – full of flowers and grass and trees and earth.  I have fond memories of coming to visit Ronnie here when I was a little girl.  Back then, she didn’t have a bathroom or electricity.  It was quite novel for me as you can imagine it would be for a child.   Now she has both – though that’s about as modern as it gets.  She has no TV, no refrigerator (she has an ice box), no computer, no microwave, no toaster oven. She lives deep in the woods at the end of a long dirt road.  Her house doesn’t even have a postal address, just her name and the town of Ripton, VT…  that’s all that goes on the envelope.  She’s a total bad ass.  She chops all her own wood, grows much of her own food, survives the Vermont winters out there all alone, defends against bears… it’s pretty incredible.  I’m completely fascinated by her life.

Meanwhile, the Vermont Cheesemakers Festival today was all I had hoped for.  We tasted loads of delicious artisanal cheeses in addition to wines, meads, breads, meats, chocolates and more.  I am still in a food coma – so I am going to write about the day’s events in detail in another post sometime this week.  But god… Vermont is so beautiful!  Shelburne Farms, where the festival took place, was pretty much a heaven on earth.  I seriously got a little emotional driving in… I think it was the sheer beauty and vast openness of the place combined with my excitement over all the cheese I was going to be eating.  It was a truly lovely day indeed.  Much more to come later.  Now I have to go sleep off this dairy hangover.   Good night!