Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig mandalavermont.org. NS
Answer
mandalavermont.org. 5 NS ns-976.awsdns-58.net.
mandalavermont.org. 5 NS ns-406.awsdns-50.com.
mandalavermont.org. 5 NS ns-176.awsdns-22.com.
mandalavermont.org. 5 NS ns-711.awsdns-24.net.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0