Last week I happened to mention that politicians and pundits take the New Hampshire presidential primary more seriously than ours in Vermont. This is not, of course, because anyone thinks people from the Granite State are smarter than we are. It's simply that their primary comes first. Also, there are a lot more Dunkin' Donuts on their side of the Connecticut River. To wit: According to the Dunkin' Donuts Web site, there are at least 100 Dunkin' Donuts franchises within 30 miles of Concord, the New Hampshire state capital. By comparison, there are only 11 Dunkin' Donuts within 30 miles of Montpelier. And when politicians are looking for ways to reach voters, doughnut stores per capita matters.

Ironically, I learned about the correlation between doughnuts and votes here in Vermont -- not New Hampshire. I was making a Saturday morning visit to the landfill not long after I had moved to Lincoln, and there to greet me was a state representative with a big box of maple cream doughnuts. And if you think doughnuts and dumps don't mix, you're mistaken. I scarfed down a couple of those maple cream bad boys beside a big mountain of garbage. It didn't matter that the hills were alive with the smell of bad yogurt. Doughnuts are the way to a fickle voter's heart. Issues? Irrelevant if you have deep-fried dough up your sleeve -- but not, of course, on your lapel. Politicians with food stains on their lapels don't inspire much confidence.

I bring up the primary a second week in a row because a friend of mine here in Vermont told me that he feels a twinge of resentment that so much attention is slathered upon New Hampshire. Consequently, I thought it worth reminding us all that even though New Hampshire has a more important primary than ours, the Green Mountains kick the White Mountains' rocky butt in other ways.

In any given spring, we are likely to produce between six and seven times as much maple syrup. In 2005, for instance, we produced 410,000 gallons. New Hampshire? A mere 57,000.

And when was the last time you saw a situation comedy heroine drown her romantic sorrows on national television with an iconic brand of New Hampshire ice cream? When was the last time someone whispered cheddar and you thought, "Ummmm. Could that be New Hampshire cheese?" We might not be as big as the White Mountains when it comes to doughnuts, but we are not slackers when it comes to angioplasty-inducing dietary fare.

Moreover, while we have a dramatically smaller population, we have produced more U.S. presidents. They can claim Franklin Pierce. We can take pride in Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur -- though, of course, Arthur is not atop anyone's list of well-known presidents. In a pivotal scene in "Die Hard with a Vengeance," even John McClane can't name our 21st commander-in-chief.

Still, I like New Hampshire. Often the names of the fictional Vermont villages in my novels are towns that really exist to our east: Reddington. Bartlett. Landaff. My wife's family has roots in Sugar Hill, N.H., one of the few New England hamlets that has a 4th of July parade that rivals the summer Hill Country Holiday parade here in Lincoln: Cub Scouts, Brownies, and a couple of fire trucks. The closest I have come to a bear while biking was in New Hampshire, and so the fastest I have ever ridden off-road was in New Hampshire.

My point? There is plenty of room for both fine states here in northern New England, and I would never want to malign the great state of New Hampshire ... even if it is upside-down.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on Sunday, March 2, 2008.)

One of my favorite essays the late Noel Perrin left behind was his short piece, “Maple Recipes for Simpletons.” It has been at least a decade since I read it, but I think of it often as the serious sugaring season approaches.

The basic premise of Perrin’s essay is pretty simple. Maple syrup is so delicious that it makes everything taste a little bit better. My favorite of his almost comically easy recipes? Soak good quality white bread in syrup to create what he calls a Vermont baklava.

Perrin was, of course, on to something. I use the stuff in everything from chili to fruit smoothies. It makes even usually inedible vegetables (I won’t name names) tolerable. It’s sort of like heroin, except you can love it and it won’t kill you in return.

One of my very favorite parts of the Champlain Valley Fair is the sugarhouse because every item of food in there begins or ends with maple syrup. It’s a crackhouse for people who view maple cream doughnuts as an integral part of the food pyramid. And based on its lines some evenings at the fair, there are a lot of folks like me who don’t make a distinction between five daily servings of fruits and vegetables and five maple cream doughnuts.

Yet outside of New England, people are willing to accept the pale substitutes for maple syrup known collectively as “breakfast syrup.” Sure, the stuff looks vaguely like maple syrup. And sometimes it’s even marketed as “maple tasting.” But it’s a far cry from the nectar that comes from a sap to syrup ratio of 40 to 1.

Of all the numbers that make Vermont special, that might be my favorite. People’s eyes grow a little wide in Florida or Arizona when I tell them it takes roughly 40 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of maple syrup, and they are always suitably impressed.

And the sugaring season comes at exactly the right point in the calendar year. We’re all just starting to grow more than a little sick of shoveling snow off our roofs or pulling icicles off the dog. We’ve wrestled our small children into snowsuits one time too many, and put a tiny foot into a tiny boot that smells like bad cheese at least once too often. Even the most rabid skiers and skaters and riders among us are starting to sense that the longer days mean it’s time to transition to other ways to stave off cabin fever. Sure, there will be great spring skiing and riding ahead of us. But, like that first sugar run or those first aromatic steams from the sugarhouse, those days are a part of the transition from winter to spring (or, to be meteorologically accurate, to mud season).

Someday, I fear, Vermont won’t be a maple syrup leader. As the Earth’s temperature creeps higher, I wonder how many of our state’s millions of sugar maples will be here in a few hundred years or how long the annual sugaring season might last in a mere five or six decades. According to Dr. Tim Perkins at the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, the sugaring season is already 10 percent shorter than it was 40 years ago. It has also shifted so that it begins earlier in the year. And that doesn’t simply make me worry for Vermont. I wouldn’t begrudge Quebec the cachet of having an exclusive hold on the world’s maple syrup.

What would disturb me is this: If someday Vermont isn’t a maple leader, it means that we have failed to stem global climate change. And that makes me worry for more than just all of us here in the Green Mountains.

It makes me worry for all of us here on this planet.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on Sunday, March 9, 2007.)

Last month I shared with you the news that one of our cats, Dorset, had joined her ancestors in that great cat condo in the sky. Thirteen days after that small eulogy ran, her feline sister, Dalvay, joined her.

After I wrote about Dorset, my family and I were overwhelmed by the condolences we received online, in the mail, and (in some cases) from the florist. So before I share another word, I want to thank all of you for your friendship and kindness, and assure you that I understand the world is a busy place and you needn't feel an obligation to drop any of us another note.

For a few days, I even wondered about the rightness of eulogizing Dalvay, unsure whether this column could (or should) bear the weight of two pet deaths in so short a time. But given my wife's desperate love for Dalvay, it would have been unfair both to her and the animal that she cherished not to write about the cat. About both Dalvay and my wife: They were inseparable. My wife is an artist, and Dalvay would sit at her feet when she would hand-color her photographs during the day, and nestle against her chest and shoulder when she would eat dessert after dinner. The animal actually had her own infant-sized Snugli carrier.

She was a tortoiseshell feline with a white chin who absolutely revered my wife. We found her at an inn on Prince Edward Island in 1993 that was named (now here's a surprise) the Dalvay. She was a kitten who ate scraps from the hotel kitchen and pipped rather than purred. The purrs would come later, when she was brought to Vermont. She was, without question, the sweetest cat my wife and I have ever come across.

And while Dorset died in my lap, Dalvay died in my wife's. This time it was cancer. Our veterinarian had operated on Dalvay three times in the last four years, but determined last October that the cancer was now inoperable and she had one to three months. She lasted four and a half, remaining characteristically cheerful until the last three days of her life, despite tumors that might have been larger than she was. Dalvay was a petite little girl, and at the end, her tumors were massive, ungainly saddle bags that protruded from just above her hind legs. Undoubtedly there were others we couldn't see.

When I left on a book tour the second week in February, I knew Dalvay had a short time remaining. But I harbored the hope that it would be possible for me to fly home from whatever city I was in when it was time, so my wife and daughter wouldn't have to euthanize Dalvay without me and so I could say goodbye to the white-chinned girl myself. Alas, it wasn't possible. On a Saturday morning my cell phone rang the moment I turned it on after landing in Cleveland. It was my wife, sobbing, because Dalvay suddenly couldn't use her hind legs and it looked to my wife as if the cat was actually crying as she lay in a corner of the room in which she had been sleeping. The soonest I could get home would have been at 8:30 that night, and this would have meant we would have had to wait until Sunday to euthanize Dalvay. And we decided that wasn't fair to her.

Consequently, once again our veterinarian, Julie Moenter, came to our house. Dalvay spent two more hours watching a video of birds and squirrels on television while sitting in my wife's lap, our daughter beside the two of them. Then Julie arrived, and Dalvay moved on. I was in a bookstore in Cleveland, aware as I spoke to the assembled readers that back home my cat was dying and my wife's heart was breaking.

I will always feel remorse that I wasn't there at the end. But Dalvay really was the most loving cat. My sense is that even if I haven't quite forgiven myself for not being there when she died, she has.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 16, 2008.)

By the time you read this, the Easter Bunny will have come and gone. If you're skimming the paper very early this morning, he might be finishing up his night's work in a time zone far to the west. But he won't be back in Vermont for another year -- which is a good thing, given the potholes and frost heaves that mark our paved roads in late March, and the way the dirt ones can be car-sucking sludge. Trust me: None of that can be comfortable on a rabbit's delicate paw pads.

A lot of people presume the expression, "mad as a March hare," derives from the male hare's rather frantic desire to find a female when the days are finally longer than a sitcom, but the reality is that the expression goes back to the Easter Bunny's annoyance that some years he has to race around the world in March. Frankly, March is a lousy time to travel.

Unfortunately, Easter is one of those holidays that moves around. This year it's March 23. Next year it's April 24. Why so fluid? Simple: Easter always occurs on the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox (March 21). It's not unlike the way super delegates are chosen.

In any case, the result is that some years the Easter Bunny is hopping through serious slop. I live in a house with no mud room, and when Easter comes this early, I can usually tell whether he has arrived in Lincoln closer to midnight or dawn by how dry the mud is in the trail from the front door to the Easter baskets.

Still, the Easter Bunny has it easier than Santa Claus. I fly a lot, and if the captain ever announced on the intercom while we were on the tarmac that it was a foggy December night but we shouldn't worry because we had a reindeer with a red nose to guide us, I would exit pronto down that emergency slide over the wing.

I love Easter, even if it is one of those holidays that is completely -- and I am choosing this word carefully -- unreasonable. I have friends who are mystified by the reality that I'm a practicing, once-was-a-deacon, ran-the-Sunday-school Christian. Not long ago this was brought home to me when a friend of mine, a woman in her early 30s who had been in a musical with my teenage daughter, told me she was worried that the near nudity and sexual innuendo our daughter was exposed to backstage might be troubling to my wife and me.

I told her that it was fine: Our daughter was 9 when she first started seeing adults moon each other across the wings when they weren't on stage.

Likewise, there are people who wonder how I reconcile an apparent bookishness with my faith. They question how I square a distinctly perverse (and, on occasion, dark) sense of humor with a belief in God. Often they are also more than a little incredulous that I am so comfortable celebrating my faith publicly in this very space.

But I have never seen any conflict between humor and faith; nor do I believe that learning and faith are incompatible. The same goes for science. Recently I heard Francis S. Collins appear on NPR's "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross. Collins is a geneticist who headed the Human Genome Project and a scientist who believes he saw evidence of God daily in his work -- in the miracle of how precisely and beautifully genes fit together. Collins is author of the best seller, "The Language of God," in which he discusses how science and faith are reconcilable, and how the nearly universal desire among people to make the right moral decision (or at least understand there is a right moral decision) suggests there is indeed divinity out there.

I agree. And so today, once again, I will celebrate a miracle. I will celebrate with song and sermon and joy -- and, yes, with chocolate eggs, marshmallow peeps, and the vision of a bunny who moves at unimaginable speed through Green Mountain muck.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on Sunday, March 23, 2008.)

You know you are staying in a terrific hotel when they bring you other people's underwear. Recently I was on a book tour and that's what I got. No mints on the pillow, but some lovely women's panties.

Book tours, of course, sound glamorous. They're not. Since 1995 I have been on a lot of them, and I can tell you that by day 13 there is a pretty good chance you will have been reduced to wearing somebody else's underwear.

The problem is that you rarely spend more than one night in a city. The book tour I was on from Feb. 12 to March 7 was no exception. And that means that unless you bring a suitcase the size of a Mini Cooper, you only have enough clothing (translation: underwear) for the first half of the tour because hotels need a day to do your laundry. In the case of the tour I just completed, I had to reach Minneapolis -- days 11 and 12 -- before I had the requisite two nights for laundry: I arrived Friday afternoon and would check out Sunday morning.

Consequently, the first thing I did on Saturday was send out a suitcase-sized pile of laundry. I think there were items in there that were alive. When I returned to my hotel room that night after my appearances, there waiting for me was ... somebody else's underwear. Actually, it was somebody else's lingerie. Women's panties ... and they belonged to a very petite woman. And so I sent the lingerie back downstairs to the bellman and gave the front desk the name of the hotel where I would be Tuesday, in the event someone found my underwear when the laundry reopened Monday.

Now, I've done this long enough to know rule No. 1 of a book tour: Never give the hotel all of your underwear. On Friday night I had washed two pairs by hand in the sink. Plus, there was the underwear I was wearing, which meant I had three pairs when I flew to my next city Sunday.

Incidentally, I had a lovely seatmate on that flight. Sitting beside me was a senior citizen who was afraid of flying and insisted on telling me about the three people she had known who had died in separate plane crashes. I took comfort from the idea that if you had lived as long as she had, it was inevitable you would know three people who had died this way.

Monday, between appearances, I bought underwear. Then I promptly forget it at the airport in Milwaukee because it was a bag I was unaccustomed to carrying through security. By the start of week three, I had been wedged into so many regional jets and strip-searched at so many airports that it's a miracle I hadn't boarded a plane without wearing shoes.

Was I alarmed that I had left my new underwear behind at the airport? Was I embarrassed when I heard a request over the intercoms asking the man who left his underwear behind at security to please return for it? Little bit. Unfortunately, my plane was boarding and there wasn't time to go back. And so I imagined I would be drying underwear on the hotel heater overnight for the next week and a half. But then on Tuesday there was a Federal Express package waiting for me at my hotel. I opened it with more excitement than was reasonable given that all I expected to find was underwear that I already owned. Instead, however, I unwrapped ... someone else's underwear! This time, however, they were men's boxers. And they were my size. And they were clean. There were six pairs. This meant that if I included the three pairs of my own that remained, I had exactly as many pairs of underwear as there were nights left until I returned to Vermont.

The result? Once more a book tour lived up to its reputation for glamour: I did my last week on the road in somebody else's underwear. It doesn't get more exhilarating than that.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on March 30, 2008.)