​The Smell of the Sea

I love Vermont. It’s strange little place, but it’s a cool strange. You can live in one town, but your mail is sent to a different one. People around here think that’s normal. We have politicians in power across the political spectrum. Our state is practically the same size and shape as its neighbor, New Hampshire, only upside down, standing on its head. You can easily travel north and south, but not east or west. 
 
We have mini-metro areas surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of woods and fields. A plethora of animals, insects and plants populate this rural expanse, though there are few humans. We are blessed with a kaleidoscope of green and an ongoing opera of bird songs; of seasons: five of them. We’ve flatlands, mountains, rivers, little pavement and one long, narrow lake. 
 
What we don’t have is an ocean. This is something I miss. The ocean is alluring, a source of opportunity, of escape. It is alive, dangerous, and too vast to comprehend. It reaches deep within you.
 
Before we “swallowed the anchor” Lisa and I went through a sailing phase. Based in Salem, we sailed Boston’s north shore and Penobscot Bay. Vermont is amazing, but there is no ocean, the sound of the waves, or that ocean smell.
 
Then a was walking around the new vegetable garden, looking at all the different shaped and colored plants when a slight breeze came up. Suddenly I was transported back to our sailing days and time on the coast. It was completely unexpected, but intensely powerful. 
 
What set off this nostalgic voyeurism? An organic fertilizer we add to the soil to provide extra nutrients for the vegetables made from the leftover detritus from the fish filleting processing in Gloucester, MA. 
 
I feel more complete with a little bit of the ocean in Vermont.