As the Community College of Vermont prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, I’ve been doing a good deal of reflecting and reading.

In an editorial from 2013, longtime CCV staff member David Buchdahl describes the cramped quarters where he worked after starting out at the college. Buchdahl would eventually become regional director, academic dean, and then, director of institutional research at CCV. But his first office was 24 square feet, with walls made of particleboard nailed to 2x4s.

A cross-sector coalition of community partners wants to hone a proposal it believes could aid the disproportionate number of single mothers living in poverty in Barre by helping them overcome barriers to employment.

I have just proudly read the feature you have done on Malinga Mukunda [“A New American Finds Purpose, and ‘Family,’ in Caregiving,” December 4]. Mukunda has been one of the best students I have had at Community College of Vermont in Winooski. She was not only a great student, but a wonderful person ready to assist her classmates, and it was obvious that she helps a lot of people in the community.

“Regret should be one of the stages of grief,” I told my mother last spring. We were talking, as we often do, about things we wished we’d known, wished we’d done differently, when my youngest sister, Madelyn Linsenmeir, was alive. I’m told this is common after a loved one dies — cataloging the moments you wish you’d said or done something differently, the what ifs haunting your memories like ghosts.

Last Friday, Element Skateboards announced a new addition to its roster of pro skaters: Williston native Chris “Cookie” Colbourn. Colbourn, 28, isn’t the first Vermont skateboarder to turn pro. But his contract with Element, a major California-based action sports apparel and gear brand, is among the highest-profile sponsorships ever awarded to any skater with local roots. For the Vermont skateboarding community, that’s a BFD.

In my extensive travels across the state, I’ve learned a lot from Vermonters. Most I have spoken with look at the changes UVM has undergone in the last 15 years — from state-of-the-art new buildings that have transformed our campus to research that has improved the lives of Vermonters, to rising academic quality and robust enrollment — and see a vibrant institution on an upward trajectory that is good for the state.

But some see these gains differently; as coming at the expense of Vermont and Vermonters. In their view, the university, in pursuit of the out-of-state tuition revenue necessary to fund its advance, is turning its back on Vermont and Vermonters.

In November 1869, the St. Albans Weekly Messenger reported on the status of Brattleboro, a town that was about as far away from St. Albans as you could get and still be in Vermont. The paper was commenting on Brattleboro’s recent hard times. In October, a Whetstone Brook freshet had wiped out many of the businesses along the brook and in early November a fire had destroyed all of the businesses on the west side of Main Street between Elliot and High streets.

Emily Casey didn’t always like essays.

“I had always thought of essays as boring, nature stories… that just didn’t appeal to me,” she said in a conversation last week. “But when I was in college other people were really pushing the boundaries of what an essay could be… Braided essays really spoke to me — with a theme weaving through thoughts.”

Casey, a 2012 MFA graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, didn’t always like telling the truth either.

“The publishing of my book ‘Made Holy’ coincided with the truth of telling about my own recovery,” she said. “The day the book published was the day I came out as an alcoholic.”

Being a supporter of President Donald Trump in this lakeside city that gave birth to Bernie Sanders’ style of socialism, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and the uber-hippie jam-band Phish can result in some strange encounters.

Consider the plight of Norman Joshua Boyden III, a clock-maker known to most people as “Pat” because he was born on St. Patrick’s Day.