“In the early morning hours of Monday, March 6, my life flipped upside down with the words ‘get out, get out, it’s a real fire!’ Running outdoors in one’s pajamas, into a windchill of -14, is not an experience I recommend to anyone.
“The heroes of our Burlington Fire Department were there in short order, and the Red Cross was behind them by just a few minutes. Wonderful neighbors opened their doors at once and kept them open all night through hours of the interviews, paperwork, and other mundane details of a waking nightmare. Other people’s gloves and heavy coats and bags for retrieving what we could when it was over appeared seemingly out of nowhere. A night that went badly but could have gone far, far worse was made bearable by not going through it alone. Vermonters are the best people in the world.
“I don’t know yet how long I will be displaced. There is a long period of friends’ guest rooms and daily conversations with insurance companies yet to come. There could have been a long period in a burn unit, and I am writing a Front Porch Forum post, not an obituary, so I am very grateful.
“Thanks for listening.
“P.S.–check your smoke detectors!!”
• Holly, Old North End FPF, Burlington
“On April 27, my 13-year-old was attacked just before 6 p.m. by a man with a folding pocketknife on the bike path near the train trestle between North Beach and Leddy Park. The man demanded my son hand over his bike and his wallet. Although my son was fortunate enough to get away with both his bike and his wallet, the man slashed him with the knife on his face and his shoulder. The cuts were superficial, but the whole event was incredibly frightening. Please take care on the bike path!”
“The decline of the web in favor of social media entails grim consequences. Hyperlinks were the founding principle of the web; it secured a diversity, nonlinearity, decentralization and interactivity, which made the web so powerful. But social media’s very philosophy and monetization strategy, or the stream, cannot be friendly to hyperlinks, since they do not want their users to leave their space. This new environment, in addition to the currently dominant algorithms, which favors popularity and now-ness rather than diversity and quality, is worse than television in its potential damage to representative democratic societies, where majority is supposed to take informed decisions without jeopardizing minorities. The rise of identity politics and intolerance for diversity is directly linked to the current form of the internet. This is the deepest shock of this transition to me since my release. This shift from what I call books-internet to TV-internet.”
“Thank you
“Posting for a friend: She had a chicken coop stolen off her property in Hinesburg Wednesday afternoon about 3-4:30. Blue Chevy pick up headed towards Bristol with 3 people 2 males and 1 female. If you saw them or have any information please contact Hinesburg Police. I don’t have a photo of the coop but it’s big, stands on 4 legs, has window on side and long one on back to get eggs out. No siding on it yet just plywood on sides. Its about 6 feet by 4 feet.”
“Within minutes of Monkton’s
“Thank you very much to whomever returned my wallet to City Market customer service. A friend of mine at Mule Bar told me today that he had seen that someone had found my wallet on
“I would like to thank all who inquired… all 4 Longaberger baskets have been sold. I meet the nicest people people on