last Friday: leaving Brattleboro

[15_the_circle]

[OT from cottage renovations]

even on those occasions when the train runs on time it does not make good connections to the flights we needed to catch back to Illinois -> Alaska and to Maryland.  better timing was afforded by the motor coach service of Vermont Transit so in the warm morning we duly presented ourselves at its terminus, ready to ride back down the valley of the Connecticut with a change at Springfield MA whence Peter Pan was at the ready to forward us to Hartford. 

in Brattleboro the thrice-daily stages do not call at the train station, preferring instead a modest facility to the N of town in a parking lot behind a filling station.  to call the depot unlovely would be an injustice to things that are merely homely: it was a converted house trailer, but one in which amiable staff provided a small lending library whose collection of titles was eclectic bordering on the bizarre (e.g., a spiral bound 1982 Chocolate Lovers month-at-a-glance appointment calendar whose worn edges and slightly fraying cover and pages betrayed much thumbing through over the quarter century since it was issued). 

having a few minutes of leisure in the slanted morning light I wandered around the grounds, such as they were, to seek out roadside botany. 

(click through these thumbnails for higher resolution images)

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Brattleboro VT

Cirsium

(included for the benefit of betsy_beekeeper)

   
... with pollinator

the pale touch-me-not of which I had learned a week earlier in the Grove was also present, like the thistle attracting a pollinator. 

Impatiens pallida

with an unnamed creek in the background this spike, laden with blossoms, towered up at the edge of the parking lot. 

another familiar cultivar was this cleome, one of a bright row in a bed along the N side of the filling station out front. 

Cleome

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good news

for the benefit of any who might have worried that our visit might have been incomplete due to the lack of an encounter with a devouring fungus, relief was at hand:

we don't seem to be living in the storyline in which it expanded to encompass the whole of Brattleboro.  surely that would have made the news.  unless, of course, nobody survived to report the incident.  you can never tell.