Jennifer Shaw

Hello again! I hope you had a fun Fourth of July or a pleasant weekend, at least. Ours wasn’t perfect, but it was easier than the previous one. We had a casual evening on Thursday with our neighbors as we enjoyed some barbecued sausage shipped all the way from The Salt Lick in Driftwood, Texas.

There are many things I love about Vermont, but the food’s not one of them. It’s tough to beat Texas cuisine, and, on holidays, we like to have certain Lone Star foods shipped here–barbecue for Independence Day and tamales for Christmas.

Or, we’ll go out of our way up here to find the closest thing possible. Good barbecue is easier to procure–the meats can come frozen in the mail. Tex-Mex is a little harder, and for the first two years we lived here, my mouth watered for cheese enchiladas. Thankfully, we found a restaurant in Lebanon, Gusanoz, that’s pretty close to your family Tex-Mex fare back home. The ambience is right, and it’s nice to have the rice and beans with an enchilada that isn’t the tiny, tomatoey Green Mountain gringo’s sad version.

One thing Vermont does do well is the maple creemee–which is basically a maple-flavored soft-serve ice cream cone. The best are made when someone hand-spins maple syrup into true vanilla ice cream, mixing it thoroughly and creating a flavor reminiscent of coffee but sharper and tastier. When the premade creemees come out of a machine, they’re a bit chemically and just aren’t as good. That being the case, my husband researched the top nine places to get the best maple creemees in the state, and on Saturday, we put Daphne in the car, intent to try number one on the list, Bragg Farm located in East Montpelier. But she wasn’t having it. After five minutes on the road, she started howling, and we gave up and turned around, conceding a simpler day at home. She perked up immediately once we were there.

Sunday, however, was better. Our neighbor invited us to join his family for swimming in Island Pond, a town about thirty minutes north of ours. I’m always eager to find new swim spots, so we got ready for a lake day and hopped in the car. After struggling to find the right spot–stopping first behind a retirement home at a tiny beach covered in goose shit–we made it to the right place, Brighton State Park, a lovely swim beach with soft, cleaner sand and hygienic restrooms. The view of the village’s buildings, including two white steeples, across the expansive water was gorgeous in a classic New England way, and the water was the warmest it’s been this summer. We all had a blast, and Jer got to see how well Daphne’s regained her float after going without swim lessons for the last four years.

Swimming. It’s incredibly important to our daughter. It’s her favorite thing to do, and I believe it regulates her senses better than anything else. When she swims, she feels the best she can.

Her autism includes Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), which basically means her neurodivergent brain does not process information from the world the same way neurotypical brains do. The information she takes in both externally (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) and internally (proprioception, interoception, etc.) gets scrambled–not unlike a radio receiver struggling to pick up a clear frequency. What she feels is often crackled, faint, or maybe too strong, which does not allow her to respond as easily and correctly to stimuli as most of us can. As a result, she might feel something too strongly, or she might feel it only dully or too faintly. This can result in her covering her ears because noises are too loud, for instance, or not wiping her mouth with her napkin because she can’t feel the food on her chin. It took us years to potty train her, probably because she didn’t recognize that internal need to urinate and defecate the way most kids do, so controlling where she did it was a longer, slower process. Her SPD also means motor planning and functioning are more challenging. For example, it took her a long time to learn how to jump up and down, and even now she can’t throw or catch a ball as smoothly as most of her peers can. She struggles with things like zippers and buttons, and she has nowhere near the coordination to play a sport, though I haven’t given up hope that she will one day.

But swimming, well, she’s a pro at it. She’s fearless in the water, and at the height of her swim lessons when she was four years old, she could float on the surface like a little human raft. There’s something about the feel of the water on her body, and being underwater, and breaking the surface, that perfectly fine-tunes the reception of her senses. Suddenly, her experience of the world sharpens, comes into focus, and everything is clear and balanced.

What a joy, then, for us to realize all the magnificent lake swimming Vermont offers. When I used to think about living here, I thought about snow sports and hiking. I never considered all the swimming but, hello! Where there are mountains, there are usually lakes. Plenty of them. And these are simply gorgeous.

Two near us are Crystal Lake and Maidstone Lake, which are similar in that they’re surrounded by forested hills and have a soft, graceful look about them, though Crystal Lake is bigger. Maidstone is cozier and happens to contain the purest water in Vermont. Hmm, makes me wonder if that’s the reason for its name. Both are relatively close–Maidstone is about an hour north and Crystal about thirty minutes.

Now, as mentioned, we have a new place to swim in Island Pond, which is rather large all the way around and features a forested island in the center. It has a sportier, more recreational New England feel, and speedboats love to race around the island.

My favorite lake, however, and the one closest to us at only twenty minutes away is stunning Lake Willoughby in Westmore. It is a fjord-style body of water that is long, narrow, and, on its south beach, bordered by sheer, rocky cliffsides that manage somehow to give it both a cozy and an epic feel. Its view from the south is one of the most photographed places in Vermont, and it reminds my husband of Hawaii while it reminds me of a Scottish loch. On a summer day when the golden sun dapples the water, the peace and beauty of it takes my breath away. It is truly one of those special places on earth, and Lake Willoughby has become my summer happy place.

We are so incredibly fortunate to have these wonderful bodies of water so close. I believe, too, that the total sensory experience of lake swimming trumps pool swimming for our daughter any day. She has around her verdant mountain countryside to admire, not to mention vast amounts of chlorine-free water, and there’s wildlife to observe. Early summer is the season of ducklings and goslings, and we’ve been watching a family of ducklings on Lake Willoughby grow up. They’re nearly teenagers now.

Daph was so happy midswim at Island Pond that, at one point, she sat in the shallow water, stretched out her legs, then just lay down beneath the surface, totally submerged before popping back up. Jer made the joke that her little, lone arm might emerge holding a magical sword like Excalibur. A miniature Vivian, a little Lady of the Lake.

In this gorgeous countryside, it’s possible to imagine such a thing.

I hope you’re also enjoying summer activities near and dear to your heart. Let me know what you’re up to; I’d love to hear it!

I’ll be back next week with writing updates, but just so you know, things are trucking along just fine on that front–lots of great feedback and editing!

Until next Tuesday!

XOXO,
Jenn