Our Cousins in Vermont – a family visit and some sightseeing

As mentioned in my previous post, my Cousin Frank said, “Come see us sometime,” just before Bob learned about some free JetBlue miles from his glory days as a paid employee. So, we flew to Boston for a couple of nights with Jim and Kathryn, and then we drove up into Vermont to visit Frank, Shawn, and Houston.

We happily joined legions of white-haired leaf-peepers intent on inhaling Vermont’s colorful change of seasons. What I recall from a long-ago glimpse of Vermont was fall foliage, winding roads, white-steepled churches, and covered bridges.

Indeed, the leaves were changing, the roads winding, we saw a few quaint, white churches, and Bob found us a bridge. At 280 feet, the Scott Covered Bridge is the second-longest covered bridge in the state.

I’d like to take a minute and show you how Frank and I are related.

This is a picture of a picnic in the woods above Nana Helen and Grandpa Frank’s home in New Jersey from the late ’30s or early ’40s. Grandpa Frank, Nana, John, Frank, and Frank’s sons, Frank and Mark, were all in show business in New York.

Therefore, Frank and I are first cousins. He is my father’s brother’s son. Helen and Frank had two sons: Frank (Frank’s dad) and John (my dad).

When my Uncle Frank married my Aunt Kathy, Nana and Grandpa split off an acre for them to build on. So Frank and his younger brother, Mark, grew up next door to our grandparents. My parents and five siblings lived close enough to join everyone for Sunday dinner, which sometimes included both Nana and Grandpa’s extended family.

I often spent the entire weekend at Nana’s with one or two of my brothers. Aunt Kathy would take us all to the beach. We played make-believe games with the neighborhood kids, and climbed the hill through the woods with the dogs. It was a pretty sweet childhood.

Nana did all the cooking, likely prepping for days. In the summer, she’d make iced tea, potato salad, bake a poppyseed cake, and fry some chicken. In the colder months, she might make artichokes, a beef roast with potatoes, mashed carrots and turnips with sweet cream butter and kosher salt, and an orange cake with butter cream frosting and bakers’ chocolate melted across the top and dripping down the sides.

When we arrived at Frank and Shawn’s, Frank had dinner mostly prepped. It’s safe to say that Frank inherited his Nana’s culinary flair. Not everyone has a palate to please the masses, but he does, just like his Nana did. What tastes good to Frank tastes good to everyone else.

Here’s the story behind the orange rotary phone. Shawn told me that she and Frank were in a vintage store and didn’t quite find anything they liked until she spotted the shop’s landline in her favorite color. And even though the phone was in use, Shawn must have made them an irresistible offer, and now it lives in their kitchen.

We hadn’t seen Frank and Shawn’s daughter, Houston, for some years, so it was a treat to spend time with her. She recently moved across the yard into a newly finished home designed by Frank in the same contemporary style as the main house.

Frank jokes that their house resembles a double-wide on steroids. I wouldn’t go that far, but it does possess an unusual floor plan. Imagine a two-story, one-room-wide tower with windows on the long sides, and a walk-out basement that opens onto a patio. There’s a deck off the dining room, similar to their previous home. Upstairs are two bedrooms, one at each end. Simple and airy, with a large kitchen and a cozy den downstairs. We’d been to their New Jersey home a number of times, but this was our first visit to their Vermont home.

We slept like angels in a comfy bed beneath a delightful cross breeze with a full moon beaming outside. When I asked Shawn if she had chosen the warm wall colors, she said, No, Houston did.

The next morning, I joined Shawn for strength training with her personal coach. We hung from bars until our grip failed, did squats, lunges, jumps, and sit-ups. Her trainer cut me a break, giving me lower weights and a not-so-high jumping platform. Even so, my legs were sore for four days. She and her partner were very knowledgeable and happily answered all my questions regarding protein, hydration, and how to build stronger bones.

Shawn’s trainer had recommended Dr. Peter Attia’s book, Outlive, which Shawn had already read and generously passed along to me. So I went home with some notion of how to do what needs done if I want to be reasonably independent in my last decade of life. Attia calls this our marginal decade, when our capacity drops by 50%. You can view his interview on 60 Minutes here.

Between that workout and walking Houston’s dog, Lobo, with Frank, I left in better shape than when I arrived.

In the summers, Houston works at Kingland Bay State Park, a place we were eager to see. Sadly, Houston had to work at her winter job, so we retirees went without her.

Houston is a published photographer who posts compelling nature photos on social media—puffins!—many of them taken at this beautiful park. She truly has a gift for composition, and the patience it takes for brilliant nature photos. She and her camera are planning a trip to Alaska, and one to New Zealand.

Like cooking, photography runs in the family. My father had a darkroom in Nana’s basement and took many of our family photos. Nana’s nephew, Steve Wallace, was a professional photographer, as was my brother, John.

We snapped a photo of the wind playing with our hair and went out for lunch.

After coffee the next day, we said goodbye to Houston and walked over to see her new place.

The contractors had done a fine job of manifesting Frank’s vision of “elegant sufficiency,” a phrase often used by his mother. They had built an apartment with a separate room for storage and perhaps a pool table above a three-car garage. The outside of Houston’s house echoed the main house and, like the main house, was gleaming with glass.

I loved that they had installed a pulley, a beam, and a roll-up door outside the storage room. “That’s how we got all the materials up there,” Frank said. A backstage, showbiz trick to be sure.

And then it was time to hit the road. This time, Bob took a more direct route back to Jim and Kathryn’s, routing us through Montpelier, where we rejoined the river of tourists for a look-see at Vermont’s historic State House.

Bob couldn’t resist posing next to an enormous cannon. For the record, we are both pacifists.

This is not the Ethan Allen of furniture fame; this is Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero and one of Vermont’s founding fathers.

It warmed my heart to see a woman with a sheaf of wheat atop the blinged-out Capitol dome. Agriculture is so often overlooked.

Speaking of bling, this was the brightest tree we saw in all our driven miles. You can see the State House peeking out from behind this funky sandstone house.

My parting shot is a montage of mass transit, a nod to the dairy industry, and a FedEx delivery truck. I don’t know what it means, but I think it’s art. The kind of art that makes you go, “Huh.”