While most people had been working inside office buildings, I had been climbing up and down trees with a bucket of apples draped over my chest. In the orchard, days follow one after the other like the afternoon storm clouds that roll out of the Adirondak Mountains and darken the Champlain Valley. Time isn't measured with a clock. It passes with a slow, inevitable certainty. The sun drops a little lower on the southern horizon each day.
Leaves turn color and then fall to the ground.
Geese pass overhead. The apple pickers finish their last rows, hang up their buckets and go home for another year. Now in Burlington, walking with concrete underfoot, I was dazed by the brightly lit, well-ordered streets and the upscale shops, restaurants and pubs that lined them. I suddenly felt tense and uneasy as I looked into the strained and harried faces of the residents of this prosperous, liberal city. The people around me appeared so constrained and pulled inward even on their night off.