My father had a pretty good relationship with his mother-in-law. He called her Fat Irene. And just so I am clear about this, he called her Fat Irene to her face.

Now Irene Nelson Zibelli was by no means obese. When I recall her in my mind or glimpse the snapshots of her that I have in Vermont, there is a woman with my mother's moonstone blue eyes and impressively ridge-like cheekbones. Her eyeglasses are severe, tortoiseshell ovals that taper to points so sharp they look as if they could cut diamonds. She is shorter than my mother and, yes, a little heavier. By the time I knew Fat Irene, she was obviously a grandmother, but she still fought the good fight against dowdiness: She wore bathing suits with leopard print and zebra designs. She loved tooling around in my grandfather's classic convertible Mustang.

I asked my father once how my grandmother wound up with the nickname, Fat Irene, and how he got away with calling her that. He roared with laughter and answered, "You know, I didn't call her that all the time." But he also wasn't especially forthcoming about the derivation of the moniker.

Fat Irene lived near my family and so I saw her often when I was growing up. (Just for the record, I never called her Fat Irene.) As a boy, I witnessed her playing Christmas carols on the massive organ at the Macy's department store in December; I saw her riding the waves in the Gulf of Mexico on her belly on a Styrofoam surfboard; and I saw her meticulously fashioning her Swedish meatballs in kitchens in Connecticut, New York and Florida. She took a lot of pride in her meatballs, and by the culinary standards of the Swedish side of my family -- a bar that was never exceptionally high -- they were first-rate. It would be a stretch to imply that she was a second mother to me. But she was certainly a wonderful presence in my childhood. The truth is, she is indeed one of the people I recall on Mother's Day when I think of the women, in addition to my mother, who raised me.

She was stern, but not nearly as stern as one might have expected given those eyeglasses, and she had a wit that it took me until middle school to understand: She was wry and wise and may have appreciated irony above all else. Before Alzheimer's had diminished her to a shell toward the end of her life, she had to have been the most caustic shuffleboard player in her circle of friends, pushing the discs with what I think now must have been cryptic resignation.

Oh, but how I loved to visit her after she had moved to Florida, and play shuffleboard with her or search with her for shells on the beach. I savored every moment that I had in the backseat of that Mustang that she and my grandfather had christened Tony the Pony -- a nickname I always understood much better than I did "Fat Irene."

My sense is that my daughter has a similar appreciation for her grandmother: Her mother's mother. (She has no real memories of mine, since she was only 20 months old when my mother passed away.) I would never call my mother-in-law Fat Sondra, in part because she is tall and slender, and in part because she is slightly more rigid than a skyscraper girder. She makes the 18th-century court of Versailles look informal. But she has been a loving, integral part of my daughter's childhood in much the same way that Fat Irene was a part of mine. Instead of shuffleboard, there is badminton. Instead of a classic Ford Mustang, there was a 1966 blue Catalina. And like Fat Irene, my mother-in-law isn't nearly as stern as she might seem on the surface. Below that inflexible exterior, there is indeed a grandmotherly softness, a grandmotherly grace.

Happy Mother's Day -- to all the moms and the grand-moms out there.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 11, 2008.)

Last month, Louise W. Hutchins passed away in Bristol at the age of 89. I hadn't seen Louise since the spring of 2006, but I thought of her often and felt a distinct connection to her. Why? It was from her and her husband, Marshall, that my wife and I bought the house in which we have lived for over 21 years and have raised our daughter, our cats, and -- for a time -- our hermit crabs. It is the house in the center of Lincoln in which Louise and Marshall raised their son, Roy, who still lives just around the corner from us.

We bought the 1898 Victorian over Labor Day Weekend in 1986 and moved in on Oct. 30 that year. Among the wisdom Louise offered? We should expect a lot of trick-or-treaters our first Halloween. I'm sure I nodded politely, but clearly I didn't pay attention. After all, I must have thought to myself, my wife and I hadn't had a single child come to our apartment door in our two Halloweens in Brooklyn. Perhaps I expected as many as 15 or 20 children in Lincoln. Wrong. We must have had nine or 10 times that many. By six p.m. that Halloween we were out of candy, and we were telling first-graders that bouillon cubes were caramels.

I think Louise worried that my wife and I were too young and inexperienced to manage an eccentric old building that even then was starting to flirt with its centennial. She was concerned that those two kids from New York City were getting in way over their heads (we were), and that they might not appreciate the subtleties of the house and the community (we didn't).

And so she and her husband encouraged me to visit them weekends that September. I was living on South Union Street in Burlington and working on College Street, and my wife was still in Brooklyn, selling our co-op there and commuting to her job on the 104th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers.

I enjoyed those Saturday visits with Marshall and Louise. Marshall had been a state legislator, and the two of them introduced me to Vermont politics. They showed me where to keep boots for the basement because the basement floor was largely dirt and Louise wanted to make sure that I didn't track mud through the house. And they warned me that the upstairs would be a tad brisk in the winter because it wasn't heated. It was indeed: That first winter, before we had begun to heat the second floor, the windows iced over so that we couldn't see out, and numerous nights we slept in parkas and wool hats.

One day Louise asked me if we were going to keep the house's exterior clapboards yellow. I said I thought so, and she was relieved. (My mother would ask me that same question the first time she saw the house, though she was a little less enthusiastic when I gave her my response.) Louise had lived in that house almost her entire adult life, and it must have been difficult to say goodbye to it -- and to know that its caretakers really hadn't the slightest idea what they were doing.

Someday, perhaps, my wife and I will be feeling the same way. It must very hard to let go.

And yet among all the advice that Louise offered, all the wisdom that she shared, the most valuable probably had nothing to do with the house. I was sitting in the living room with her and her husband on one of those visits, and I told them that I was hoping to be a writer. Louise nodded thoughtfully and then remarked, "You know, you could find plenty to write about right here in Lincoln." After 16 years of writing this column -- and nearly 850 entries -- I'd say she was right.

Goodnight, Louise. Thank you for the house ... and the counsel.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 18, 2008.)

Church Street is one of the great people-watching venues in Vermont. It is also one of the best spots to park yourself and eavesdrop. The following are actual, unedited snippets of conversation I heard a few Fridays ago, when I savored the spring sun and listened in on remarks that were absolutely none of my business.

"There's a nice family. They have children. Would you like to go live with them?" (Spoken by a harried 30-something mother to her toddler in a stroller.)

"Somewhere around here they have flying monkeys -- not live ones. I'll go ask." (Male tourist to his wife.)

"Duh. He doesn't do those things on purpose. He's just stupid. I mean, he's going out with me. What does that tell you?" (Teen girl on a cell phone.)

"I do not have a beer belly. I have a beer bottom. There's a difference." (Male college student, his voice only a tad defensive.)

"Please. I don't have time to spell." (Teen boy to a friend while walking and texting.)

"Take the high road. You might get a nosebleed, but no one ever died from a nosebleed." (Female executive, mid-40s.)

"Honestly? I can't tell you what we decided. I could make something up, if you want. But I was looking out the window at a sailboat on the lake. It was completely hypnotic." (Male executive, mid-20s. I am hoping he is not a banker, but I fear by his suit that he is.)

"Are you saying we've already had our primary? Like for the president? How come nobody told me? I would have voted!" (Female college student, with any luck not one majoring in political science.)

"Look, honey, it's a map of the universe!" (Father to his preschool daughter, pointing down at one of the international city names carved into the bricks.)

"I have no idea what they talk about when Jim and I aren't home. They're cats." (Female executive, mid-30s.)

"Yeah, I was pretty hammered, but I was walking so it didn't matter. I mean, even if I had a car -- which I don't -- it wouldn't have been a big deal. There was no way I would have been able to put the key in the ignition. I'm still not sure how I unlocked the front door." (A young man.)

"It's named Champ because it supposedly won something. Best Water Monster. I don't know, I'm guessing." (Male tourist to his friend.)

"I don't watch much TV. I watch 'American Idol' and 'Survivor' and 'House' and 'America's Next Top Model' and 'Dancing with the Stars' when I can find it. But that's it." (A high school student, female.)

"I wouldn't want a blog. Too much work. And it sounds like a wart, anyway. 'I have a blog!' Well, why don't you go put something on it?" (A high school student, male.)

"I'm sure we can find pancakes with maple syrup. That's one of the things Vermont grows." (Mother reassuring her elementary school-aged daughter.)

And my absolute favorite unedited line of dialogue belongs to another male tourist: "It's a pretty city. It used to have a communist for a mayor."

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 25, 2008.)