Jeffersonville, Vermont, is a village most often associated with Smuggler’s Notch and skiing, but for Women’s History Month this year townspeople were invited to a screening of the American Masters Documentary on writer and activist Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise .

For most of my adult life, I lived as an immigrant – as an American transplant in the United Kingdom. Culturally, I’m British, despite having been born in Jersey, New Jersey, and never legally having secured British citizenship.

My partner James was diagnosed with Parkinson’s on his sixtieth birthday. And because we knew so little about this disease, this felt like the end of the world for us.

Growing up in the transition from Vermont’s “Republican century” to the Democratic “sixties,” the political labels we used seemed meaningless in the many discussions I had with people of differing political ideals. I usually found commonsense and decency in their differing perspectives.

During World War One, a crisis in civil liberties began brewing as Germanophobia combined with anti-union sentiment and resistance to immigration from southern and Eastern Europe to ignite widespread fear of political radicals and anarchists.

One of the best jobs I ever had was at the Children’s Television Workshop , the folks who make Sesame Street . It was the early nineteen-nineties and I was an unpaid intern in New Shows Production Research .

When I was young, I attended one of those boarding schools that held daily chapel. I can’t say that exercise brought me any closer to God, but it did instill in me a lifelong love of singing hymns.

Two weeks after announcing significant cuts in funding for climate programs across the federal government, the Trump Administration released an executive order to roll back Obama Era climate policies.

According to poll data published recently by The New York Times , Vermonters worry and talk about climate change more than the rest of the country. The Times even published a series of maps showing how people in different regions view climate change.

We were commune dwellers, anti-war and civil rights activists, radical students, academics, and local food co-op organizers, both Vermont-born and not. It was a turbulent era, in which we rejected the status quo of our childhoods, and searched for - or created – new definitions of community.