I’m so glad to hear that the Pomfret Green Team is organizing a town-wide trash pick up. We need it. I won’t be able to participate as I’m helping to organize a trash clean up in Vermont that weekend, so I decided to do my part and clean up a half mile stretch of Route 244.

When I did this yesterday I picked up seventeen pounds of garbage and twenty pounds of recyclables including $2.70 cents worth of redeemable cans and bottles. In total, there were four full garbage bags. Again, this is from only a half mile stretch of Route 244. I had cleaned the same stretch of road just last fall.

I hope that everyone that is able to participate does so, it is good for the Earth, your town and your body.

Any of the cities described in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities have similarities between it and any other place.  Many of the descriptions of the cities in his book are relevant to Pomfret.  One of my favorite, and most relevant is the description of Maurilia, Cities & Memory 5.

“In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared with the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old cards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what is has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.”

The village of North Bennington, Vermont is where I spend over half the year. It reminds me a lot of Pomfret. They both are home to lovely historic buildings, working farms, famous eateries, well known private schools and a gas station eyesore in the center of town. North B is preparing better than we are for changes in the landscape.

The Town of North Bennington has prepared a Village Plan that outlines how the town will preserve and develop its resources. It also outlines why these resources are important. How our plan could be improved is by attaching reason and value to all of the quantitative rules that exist in town zoning. Discovering the answer to “How do we preserve or create the ideal Pomfret?” is a more effective way of controlling growth than “How can we prevent change?” Download the North Bennington Village Plan if you desire to view it.