Last July, my neighbor came over to help me dig a hole to bury our dog, Elvis. He was 13 — a big, polar bear-like Maremma who had spent his life guarding our goats and, in many ways, us. He’d been fighting ailments for years, but this time he couldn’t get up — and as much as it hurt to admit, we knew it was time. Elvis had been with us since before we had kids, since before we even knew how to run a farm. He’s woven into the fabric of our lives, into this land, into Big Picture Farm itself. He is part of us, part of our identity.
My neighbor — an excavator, a Trump voter, a husband and father — had been out fishing, but when I called, he came right over. He knew Elvis, knew what he meant to us. He dug the hole quietly, then told me I could use the mini-excavator he’d left to fill it in when we were ready. Then he left us in peace.
At a time when we have fewer chances for real connection, pleasantries become a kind of architecture of neighborliness.
We vote differently, my neighbor and I. We know that. It’s no secret. And yet, over time, we’ve quietly, consciously, built a relationship that avoids politics in favor of something deeper and more durable: the neighborly act of showing up for one another. We talk about the weather. We ask about each other’s kids. We bemoan property taxes, the condition of our gravel roads, the drought’s effect on our wells. We likely disagree on nearly everything politically, but that’s beside the point. I’ve helped him in crises, too. What we share is a grounded kind of goodwill, the kind that comes from face-to-face conversation and shared work.
It starts with pleasantries. And I mean that literally: “Pleasantry” comes from the Latin placere — to please — and later evolved to mean agreeable, lighthearted exchanges that set a tone for friendship and understanding. When you’re sitting on a porch and someone walks by, you might comment on the sky, or the wind, or the mud. It’s not empty talk; it’s the beginning of shared context. Anthropologists even have a term for this kind of exchange — phatic communion — small talk that quietly reaffirms our shared world. These rituals — weather observations, nods of recognition, even the simple act of waving to a neighbor on a dirt road — are tools of social cohesion. (Vermont Public’s “Brave Little State” even devoted an episode to it: “Ode to the Vermont Wave.”) At a time when we have fewer chances for real connection, such gestures become a kind of architecture of neighborliness.
It seems almost silly to have to remind ourselves to engage in these small courtesies. But they’re precisely the faculty our screens have quietly stolen from us. Online, we express without exchanging; we broadcast without listening. The wave, the nod, the brief talk about the weather — these are small acts of reciprocity. They train us in presence. They remind us that attention is not performance but care. As philosopher Simone Weil put it, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
After graduate school, and before farming, I taught writing for a stint at Middlebury College. I used to begin with poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ weather journals. Every day, he described the same cloudy skies of northern England with newly rich language. You’d think talking about an overcast sky day in and day out would dull the senses, but it sharpens them. The more we describe the weather, the more we observe and the more nuanced our language becomes. It’s the same with our interactions. The more we engage — in pleasantries, in neighborly dialogue — the better we get at reading one another, understanding difference and responding in kind.
I also loved introducing my students to artist Roni Horn’s project “Weather Reports You,” which asked people across Iceland to give a weather report not of the sky but of themselves — their moods, their hearts, their outlooks. Because when we talk about the weather, we’re often talking about ourselves. We’re locating our identities in a shared environment. That’s the power of pleasantries: They let us be different, together.
We need that now more than ever. Journalist Ezra Klein has written compellingly about how politics has become nationalized, professionalized and algorithmically polarized. Social media has pushed us to the extremes. We used to have identities — familial, local, vocational — and then talk politics. Now politics is identity. And when identity is at stake, disagreement feels like war. Even within families, partisan divides can cut deep. The old pluralism, the idea that a political party could contain multitudes, is gone. We’ve traded community-level nuance for broadcast-level rage. And as Klein points out, we’re lonelier and angrier for it.
We’re also watching different realities. On one side of the aisle, people consume one set of facts; on the other, a completely different narrative dominates. It’s not just that we disagree on policy; we disagree on what’s even happening. When local news outlets thrived, we shared a default reality with our neighbors. We read the same headlines. Now, with fragmented digital media ecosystems, we have to work — intentionally, deliberately — to step out of our echo chambers. We have to take our news with the awareness that it’s not the whole picture. We have to cross-reference, to seek out perspectives that challenge us. It might seem exhausting, but it’s part of what we have to do to be a good neighbor, to keep finding middle ground.
Political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote about the space between — that fragile, vital arena where individuals come together to think, speak and act in concert. Politics, she argued, depends on that space: the shared world that exists between us. When we fail to engage it, we fall into what she called thoughtlessness, a kind of moral and civic sleepwalking where we stop seeing one another as full participants in the world. In our polarized age, thoughtlessness thrives in the scroll, the algorithm, the outrage cycle. What we need instead is thoughtfulness: deliberate attention to that space between us. Pleasantry, listening and dialogue aren’t trivial; they’re the groundwork of pluralism itself.
That’s why, last fall, it felt especially heartening to gather with neighbors on the wraparound porch of our friends’ farmhouse in Brattleboro. Jordan and Corina live between us and our kids’ school. We drive by their place every day and watched, over the past few years, as they painstakingly renovated a collapsing farmhouse into something quietly beautiful. They kept the character intact, right down to the porch.
They moved here during the pandemic, and now they’re doing a different kind of renovation — imagining where the Democratic Party in Vermont might go from here. They’ve started talking to people, inviting in voices not always heard. The group they’ve assembled is eclectic: small-business owners, teachers, doctors, developers, farmers, retirees, parents, volunteers and a large group of our elected officials. At our last meeting, more than 120 people gathered. This is a new and growing coalition.
The porch itself shaped the conversation. Wide and weathered, it’s the kind you find all across Vermont, boards worn smooth by boots and so many seasons. Its architecture allows it to hold contradiction naturally: private yet public, sheltered yet open, a place for both taskwork and reflection. It reminds me that the best spaces, like the best politics, can hold difference without fear, can make room for multitudes. That’s the kind of politics we need — rooted, inclusive, face-to-face. Call it farm porch politics: not shouting across the ether, but sitting shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the same horizon. Seeing it differently, perhaps, yet believing together that there’s still beauty in what our future can hold.
It’s one thing to talk about shared ground in the abstract, another to feel it beneath your feet. I was reminded of that the day we buried Elvis. In his favorite spot against a large fieldstone, in the stretch of grass overlooking the barns we can see from our bedroom window — he’s still here. He’s everywhere. He shaped the identity of this place; it’s infused with his spirit.
Our kids, 5 and 8, are infused with his spirit, too. Their sense of who they are doesn’t come from an algorithm or a national political party. It’s being formed right here, in the actual world: in the work of feeding hay to the goats, in the sound of the brook after a storm, in the ritual of collecting eggs for breakfast and playing with friends in leaf piles. That’s what roots us. That’s what steadies us.
This morning they are collecting pine cones knocked down by last night’s windstorm. They plan to make a wreath for their bedroom. Watching them — so attuned to this land, so responsive to the rhythms of weather and season — I see how identity takes shape in relation to place.
We should be deeply offended by the idea that a feed, a platform or a political campaign could tell us who we are or what we care about. Our identities aren’t manufactured; they’re cultivated, over time, in place, through attention.
In the end, that’s the kind of politics Vermont needs most: the kind that listens, that takes in all perspectives, that gathers people together on the porch as the light fades and says, Let’s find middle ground, let’s get some work done — but first, let’s talk about this sunset.
This article appears in Jan 7-13 2026.
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