Yesterday's big event: the annual strawberry-picking excursion. Just me and a field full of sunburned families in full berry-grabbing frenzy. This year I saw no toothless/dentally challenged folks, a kind of participant that abounded the last time out. An absence that left me feeling mildly disappointed.
Today's big event: Montpelier's Fourth of July parade (the customary day early), where I worked as a volunteer in the pre-procession staging area, several streets of a green, normally quiet neighborhood.
This being Vermont, the event turned out to be a funky, sweetly chaotic blend of people and happenings, including:
-- encounters between kindred souls:
-- hordes of dancing women:
-- inexplicable sightings:
-- firetrucks:
-- music:
-- and, of course, Shriners on go-karts:
One of the event's most striking aspects: a graphic show of the local tendency toward respectful, even joyful co-existence between drastically contrasting social/political elements. For example, a group of a dozen or so exuberant sailors from the U.S.S. Montpelier preceded a flatbed truck packed with a motley, dreadlocked, multi-ethnic group flailing away at drums, four grass-skirted, dancing women following in their wake, the truck flying a banner featuring the now classic (possibly even clichéd) image of Che Guevara, parade spectators cheering it all.
There is nowhere quite like this patch of green, mountainous land tucked away in New England's northwest corner. Where, as I write this, fireworks light up the falling darkness.
