Maria and I are back from a three-day fourth anniversary celebration. We started out for the first night in funky Brattleboro, Vt., a dog town, we stayed at the intensely funky and fun Latchis Hotel, in the brand new Silver Screen Room festooned with photos of movie stars – Hepburn, Grant, Gable, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis. I took a series of photos of the dogs of Brattleboro, they are everywhere, and they are welcome everywhere.

The Latchis is one of the most fun places we ever stay in, it is not for everybody but is sure is for us,  they are fixing up this gorgeous old art deco hotel and theater room by room. every year or so we stop by there to see the progress they are making. And they are making amazing process, it is quite a beautiful and atmospheric place. If you are stuffy, don’t bother.

This Latchis was the perfect place for us to spend a night and Brattleboro is nothing but fun, a combination of Berkeley, Calif. and the old East Village of New York City. We ate Korean food for lunch at Shin-La, had pineapple pancakes for breakfast at the Backside Cafe, I  bought new jeans and shirts and socks at Max’s block-long clothing store, Maria bought me an old industrial lamp for my desk, I got an musty old copy of Catcher In The Rye at one of the town’s cavernous old used book stores for $10 and was up all night reading it, I got the new Alan Furst mystery at the Mystery Bookstore on Main Street, one of the few remaining mystery bookstores in the country.

Then we went on to the old Grafton Inn in Grafton, Vt. where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe stayed, among others, and we stayed in our favorite room, which was also Paul Newman’s favorite room when he stayed there. Off-season, we can stay at this wonderful old inn very cheaply and the staff is like famiily, they remember us from our honeymoon night and brought out candles to celebrate our anniversary.

We needed a trip, the lambing experience was ricocheting in my mind and Maria and I needed to get some space from it. We talked a lot about rebirth and renewal. Do we need sheep on the farm? Do we need to simplify so we can focus on our work, Maria on her art, me on my  blog, books and photography? We are considering seeking a good home for the sheep, and making some other changes as well in our lives so we can focus on our creativity and share it. I am mindful of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his credo: we are not born just once when our mothers give birth to us, but life requires us to give birth to ourselves again and again. Rebirth and renewal, the creative life asks this of us. We are talking about a lot of things, I will share them as they are developed in our minds, we are both excited at the prospect of considered and meaningful change.

We are not seeking a life without animals, we cannot imagine a life without our dogs and our donkeys, but perspective and proportion are essential, it is wonderful that we share these ideas. How lucky, I thought again and again, that we found one another, that Maria has helped me come into my true life, and hopefully, I have done the same for her.