How To Step Down Gracefully
I wrote the last Monday newsletter on a Sunday in April, thirteen months after the first one had gone wrong. I wrote it at the same kitchen table, in the same chair, with the dog on my feet and the coffee properly weighed. Gerald was, by then, twelve years old, and had begun to sleep more deeply than he used to, and made, in his sleep, the small quick noises of a dog remembering a rabbit. The goats, reduced now to the original six plus Bernadette, plus Denise the one-eyed Alpine, whom I had come to love with the particular embarrassed intensity one loves the pets one had not chosen, were in the pasture, doing what they always did, which was to treat the pasture as a series of small personal opinions.
The wind-down had gone, by and large, the way Nora had predicted. Seven months, not ten, in the end, because the Vermont Secretary of State moved faster than Nora had dared to hope, and because the donors who wanted their money back numbered seventy-three, not the two hundred we had budgeted for, and because the board of the Barn Foundation — myself, Terry, and Ruth Abernathy — had voted unanimously at every one of the four meetings required, and because Ruth, at the final meeting in March, had said, *well, thank God that's over,* in a voice loud enough that Terry had, for the first time in the eighteen months I had known him professionally, laughed out loud.
The Discord had been