By title alone, Milk Teeth: A Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog would seem to fall into the same cutesy genre as John Grogan’s bestselling 2005 memoir Marley and Me. Though it does feature a deviantly behaved Lab and a plethora of lessons on life and love, Robbie Pfeufer Kahn’s meditative, soul-searching book couldn’t be more different.... Read more

Lake Champlain’s status as a Great Lake lasted only briefly in 1998. But the skinny, 400-foot-deep body of water that forms Vermont’s western border has always been “great” in one way: It has an unusually large drainage basin. As botanist Mike Winslow points out in his informative guide, Lake Champlain: A Natural History, the lake’s tributaries meander from as far as 120 miles away.... Read more

Thirty-eight years ago, Marty and Doug French opened their Burlington jewelry store, Fire & Metal, in the North Winooski Avenue spot currently occupied by Radio Bean. Curious about the new business, a reporter stopped by for an interview. As Marty remembers it, “She came back to us and said, ‘They won’t let me run the story, because they think you’re . . . operating on a shoestring and you’ll never make it longer than a year.’”... Read more

Photographer Stina Plant was only 29 when she decided to open an art gallery in St. Albans, where she’d grown up. Since its appearance in September 2007, Staart Gallery — the name melds “St. Albans” and “art” — has been the only dedicated multi-artist gallery in this small, blue-collar town. “I still haven’t figured out whether [the idea] was crazy or good,” says Plant, whose straight blond hair and first name hint at her Swedish ancestry.... Read more

At this point in the 21st century, it is impossible to imagine life without television. The controversial box has weathered all arguments against it, from research showing that rapidly changing colors in cartoons cause seizures in children to the cultural perception that TV dulls the imagination. Now our federal government has already blown through $1.34 billion to make sure no screen goes dark on February 17, when broadcast format switches from analog to digital. The boob tube is clearly here to stay.... Read more

Joan Furchgott, co-owner with her husband Brad Sourdiffe, of Furchgott Sourdiffe Gallery in Shelburne drives the 40 minutes to work from their home in Lincoln at least five days a week. So she’s likely to be the one welcoming visitors to the cheerful purple-and-green Victorian on Falls Road. But after a gracious greeting, Furchgott doesn’t follow customers around or press them for their tastes. “I’m not into the hard sell,” admits the friendly 53-year-old, her South Carolina origins evident in her unhurried speech.... Read more

The L ’n’ L,” as Joan Watson and Ann Barlow affectionately call the Living/Learning Gallery they co-direct, is a 546-square-foot, windowless room buried deep within the University of Vermont campus. But it’s tied to the community through a whole-living experiment that’s been going on since 1973, when UVM built its Living/Learning Center — a mini-campus of five residential buildings encircling a Commons, where the gallery is housed.... Read more

The picturesque town of Bristol once made its name in wood products: Bristol Manufacturing Company was for a time the nation’s largest producer of caskets. So it’s no surprise that Art on Main, a gallery anchoring the eastern end of Bristol’s main drag, favors a craftsmanship aesthetic. Under the embossed-tin ceiling of its single but sizeable rectangular room, the gallery displays the work of 100 area artists and artisans.... Read more

Singer Linda Radtke was sifting through the Vermont Historical Society’s collection of Vermont songs in Barre — about 1800 pieces, dating back to 1798 — when one caught her eye. “Forward Together” was written by a Richford-born woman named Arwin F.B.G. Sexauer for the state celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976.... Read more

People often joke that the nice thing about Burlington is it’s so close to Vermont. But they’re talking about a particular version of Vermont: the mountains with hiking access, the picturesque restored dairy barns, the white-steepled meeting houses. Not the decrepit trailer homes dotting the hollows on Class III roads, their front yards decorated with rusting cars. Not the homeowner who has left his Civil War-era house to rot and erected a “new” one steps away out of tattered tarps and discarded two-by-fours.... Read more