I grew up in Essex Junction, Vermont. Essex Junction, called "the Village", is next to Essex, which is "the Town."

This past week, Essex was the site of a horrible crime. An angry and disturbed man, who had just broken up with his schoolteacher girlfriend, went on a shooting spree, killing two schoolteachers and wounding several other people, finally shooting himself. He survived, as did three of the people he shot. He shot the first woman at her home and then went to the elementary school where his estranged girlfriend would have been preparing her classroom for the fall. He didn't find her, and seems to have shot randomly at the school. A bullet went through a door and shot a teacher in the head, killing her. Other bullets hit other innocent people.

The two women who were killed were both in their 50s, had been elementary school teachers for their entire adult lives, and were important to their community. One of them grew up in the Village and I knew her younger siblings and have memories of her. She will be buried in her family plot which is right next to the family plot where I just visited my dad, uncle, and grandparents' graves. She will be one more grave for me to visit and honor.

The other woman is not someone I consciously knew, although she was apparently a waitress at the Lincoln Inn, the Greek restaurant in the center of the village, at various times in her life, so I probably did know her that way. She attended the little Congregational church where I was raised, and her funeral will be there. She was the mother of the gunman's estranged girlfriend.

We are all connected somehow. My heart is torn up about this horrible tragedy and how it affects the whole community there. Essex is one of those places where people feel safe, and the town is rather insular. Of course they have crime, but shootings are rare, and a school shooting is something new for Vermont, I believe.

There is the added burden of the race issue. The gunman was African-American, "not from here" as Vermonters would say, but from Massachusetts, and all of the victims were white. This is significant because Vermonters tend to be quite racist. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. It is one of the whitest states in the country, and something like this only serves to fuel the fires of racism and divisiveness and hatred.

All of the people there have been on my mind and heart this week. I don't know how much national attention this story has received, but for me it's been a big story and I've been following it, and talking with Vermont friends, daily.

I just wanted to share the event with my blogger friends. We never quite lose our roots, do we? I can picture all of the places in this "story" and I know so many of the families who are affected, who are interviewed in the local paper, and who work at the school, police station, funeral home, etc. I go back every summer, so I've kept up my ties, even though we have no family living there anymore, just cemeteries to visit.

I feel sad about this, and angry too.

If you want to read about the events, go to www.burlingtonfreepress.com, where the coverage has been thorough. The only journalistic decision they've made which bothered me was the inclusion of photographs of the estranged girlfriend and her sister at the court hearing the next day. They are two grieving women, and I just didn't understand why their faces had to be in the news alongside the gunman's face.