Recently, I was alarmed to hear that a middle school girl was being harassed by a teenage boy who leaned out of the window of a car to yell - "brown people don't belong in this country. Get out!" After it happened the second time, her father reached out to the community to help identify the offending teen. And I can easily see how he would be concerned for his daughter’s safety.

On snowy evening just before Thanksgiving, a meeting was held in Franklin, Vermont to discuss toxic pollution in Lake Carmi.

The Olympics are upon us and there’s so much to celebrate from our corner of the country. Vermont produces more winter Olympians, per capita, than any other state and we’ve been leading the pack for many years. Locally, there’s no doubt that the Olympics are a source of immense goodwill.

I have the penciled draft of a never-published short story written by my mother about the day in 1918 that her older sister, Evelyn, died from the Spanish flu.

It was in April almost three years ago that Bernie Sanders last gave an interview to Seven Days . Since then, he’s pretty much refused.

I was talking with a young teenager, Rachael, who’s 14 and an eighth grader. As stuffy senior citizens like me sometimes do, I asked her how school was going and what she was studying. It was just a routine question, but the answer was stunning.

Soon after the Pilgrims landed, Plymouth’s William Bradford described a colony beset by dangers : What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men. . . [A]ll things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.

All the recent talk from our political leaders about making Vermont affordable reminds me of the expression "Moonlight in Vermont, or starve."

I’m one of those people who find the national news increasingly disheartening, so I appreciate when online sites and some mainstream media include “good news” in their coverage – like humanitarian stories that inspire and lift the bar instead of lowering it.

Current headlines about the resignation of Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI, and other controversy surrounding the US intelligence establishment, have reminded me of a recent disturbing story that got little notice beyond brief mentions by CNN and ABC.