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the bedroom window I stared at the faded picture of Milky Way on the barn. The morning sun shone like a spotlight on the old pet’s portrait. Egged on by a northern wind, the leaves gossiped on the branches all the way to Lake Champlain, saying a thousand good-byes to each other.
    Up and down the one-hundred-mile lake sailors are pulling their boats up on shore, readying them for winter. In a few months the lake will freeze. The ice fishermen will drive their trucks out on the frozen water and position their funny little huts where the boats had been. The snowmobilers will rip across the glassy surface. The skaters will click and clatter and thump above the fish.
    So long summer. So long George.
    I wish.

3. I Should Have Voted for Lewis Lee
    S ome mornings I push the hangover aside, crank my cold van to life in the dark, and drive the one mile to T-Bone’s farm—to watch him dance.
    Jacques Leon Thibeault, dairy farmer and dancer, never sleeps in. Every morning at four o’clock T-Bone steps out of the house, steaming mug in hand. He crosses the yard in darkness, heading for the circle of warm, welcoming light cast by the lamp over the barn door. Inside the barn, he flips on more lights, hangs his denim jacket on a hook, and drains his coffee cup. He switches on the radio.
    The milk room, where the milk is stored and waits to be transported to the dairy for processing, smells of pine, ammonia, linoleum, and starched linen. Nurses’ shoes would squeak across the smooth concrete floor. Everything in the room—bulk tank, sinks, jars, buckets, milklines—is either glass or stainless steel, sparkling glass and spotless stainless steel. A germ could see itself in the shiny surfaces.
    Through a door on the far side is the main section of the barn, a cavernous open area filled with bawling bovines. This is a clean place, too, although it doesn’t smell like it. Once a reporter from Burlington wrote an article on: “The Vermont Dairy Farmer: A Dying Breed?” The writer made much of the muck and mud, the plodding progress of owner and beast, and the aroma of the barn. He wrote of being “slapped by the smell of cow.” T-Bone loves that pungent punch. It is home hitting him in the face.
    Like a doctor, T-Bone begins by making rounds. He whistles as he strolls between the rows of stalls. Occasionally, he stops and talks to a cow, examines it more closely, his calm hands traveling knowledgeably over neck and flank, then with a pat on the rump, he continues to the next cow. When he has traversed the whole of the long barn, is satisfied with the health and happiness of his sixty head, he begins hooking up the milkers.
    Other farmers’ cows let down their milk when they hear the bawl of a calf or the hum of the milking machine. T-Bone’s cows become stimulated at the sound of his tapping boots. Shuffle, kick, shuffle, kick, udders tingle. Shuffle, kick, milk rushes to the teats.
    That morning I pulled up just as T-Bone turned up the volume on the radio. I heard the music swell into the barn, wrap itself around the cows and their udders and squeeze. As I stepped into the barn, I took in the comfortingly familiar scene: Tails swished. Milk flowed. Feet flew. The bottoms of T-Bone’s big rubber boots, which had taps nailed to them, clicked across the concrete as he hoofed from Holstein to Holstein.
    Everyone in the county knew of T-Bone’s cows. They were consistent milk producers, and they always gave Grade A milk. The other farmers teased T-Bone: When was he going to call those agriculture boys at the University of Vermont to measure the effects of a floor show on dairy cows?
    Dancing had nothing to do with it, T-Bone told them. It was the music. Music relaxes the cows. Cows aren’t so different from people, he said.
    Leaning against the door jamb, the collar of my woolen jacket turned up against the autumn snap, I watched T-Bone and began to feel my nerves unwind. It was easy to sneak up on T-Bone while he was dancing. He