Story: Days of wildflowers and nights of fireflies in Norwich, Vermont

Every season in Vermont offers its own opportunities to enjoy the outside. But it is summer when I go there the most. It is a small state, but also one of the country’s most sparsely populated so it never feels crowded. Everywhere you go there are mountain views or pastoral landscapes of expansive farms dotted with grazing cows outside of red barns.

Picturesque Norman Rockwell towns abound as do functional covered bridges. In autumn the deep woods explode with color as vibrant as those in a child’s imagination. In winter everything becomes covered in deep snow that attracts skiers from far off. Springtime is always late, and short. The locals prefer to avoid the word altogether in favor of the more accurate term “mud season.” With the summer comes warm sun and the blessed return of verdant leaves after such a long break that it shocks the green-starved eyes of every Vermonter with impossible, Kodachrome green in hundreds of coordinated variations.

I go to Norwich, Vermont in summer mostly because that is when I’m invited. I’m fortunate to have a friend who offers me the use of her house for a couple of weeks in July when she goes west to her family ranch in Wyoming. Norwich is a small town on the Connecticut River, just across from Hanover, New Hampshire the home of Dartmouth College. The town was founded by people who paddled up the river in canoes to cut down trees, build a sawmill, then a town and a church, to ultimately bring Christianity to the local Native-Americans, in that order.

My friend’s Vermont country house, brimming with antiques, sits on a unpaved country road high atop Bragg Hill, an ancient meandering ridge over the Connecticut River. The nearest neighbor is barely in sight. The house is surrounded by rolling meadows that by day are filled with swaying grasses and wildflowers and by night are aglow with thousands of fireflies. Because Norwich is so far from the light pollution of any big cities, the sky is deep black and the stars are so proliferate they look like wedding veils strung aimlessly across the sky. In the morning it is perfectly quiet, except for birdsong and I’ll always look out the windows early to watch the deer feeding in the lower meadow or the family of wild turkeys that seem to walk in a single-file line with the littlest ones bring up the rear.

Spending time in Norwich brings peace. I hike, bike and go kayaking on the river. Sometimes I just walk the three miles to town to pick up some patisserie at Alice’s Bakery, a local institution. But lest I eat too much French pastry and forget I’m in Vermont, the local general store Dan & Whit’s is only a few steps away. This place has been around forever and has a little bit of just about everything, from food to hardware to farm supplies. You need a gallon of paint and a pint of locally made ice cream? They have it. They also might have seasonal strawberries from a local farm, or maple syrup from the sugar house down the road as well as the all the sugaring equipment you need in case you’d rather tap your own trees.

On the way back up Bragg Hill, if it is the right day, I’ll stop by a wood-fired granite oven that sits by the side of the road. A couple of ladies from a local farm bake the most delicious bread there; perfect boules, hot out of the oven, crispy on the outside and their chewy inside filled with fresh herbs or walnuts. They usually sell local eggs and cheese they make themselves on their own dairy farm. As I walk on I pass beautiful old barns that are still standing despite having seen a hundred winters, I watch hay being harvested and see horses grazing in pastures. Volvos of every vintage come ripping down the country road, their natural-fiber-wearing drivers looking every bit the part of the modern Vermonter, right down to the “Save Tibet” and “Spread Fred” bumper stickers on the back.

Just beyond Norwich, the immediate area is packed with activities, from covered bridges to Shaker villages, to glassblowing at Simon Pearce, to hiking trails, quaint shops, microbreweries and historic towns. There are also the excellent library and art museum just across the river at Dartmouth. I go there almost every year to take in as much as I can and yet I always leave feeling I’ve barely scratched the surface of the true essence of Vermont. I love my home in the Pacific Northwest and yet I leave Norwich, Vermont every time with a lingering regret.