A reporter who calls Vermont home researched who owned the seemingly abandoned two acres next to his farm. He was surprised to learn it was owned by Russian exile and Nobel Laureate for Economics, Wassily Leontief then his daughter Svetlana Alpers, noted art historian. When the reporter interviewed his neighbor, Ms. Alpers shared memories of her idyllic childhood summers foraging for strawberries and mushrooms and stargazing. Ms. Alpers loves her land and has told her sons she wants her ashes scattered there.
In Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom, two acres of mystery
By Colin Nickerson | Read entire article
On a far corner of my farm in northeastern Vermont, there’s a 2-acre patch of mystery land.
The timbered lot is abutted on three sides by my property and on the fourth by a serene body of water called May Pond. With a sharp eye and time to kill, you can locate rusted iron survey “pins.’’ Otherwise spruce, birch, and dense puckerbrush seamlessly conceal the deeded boundaries.
It’s more picturesque than dramatic — except for several glacial boulders thrusting from the dark water a few feet from shore.
Once, a girl named Svetlana perched on the largest and imagined herself a water sprite, a winged pixie of ripples and depths.