Pud and Ginger Leland bought the lot next to Union Carbide and built a modern prefab ranch house, the first of its kind in Morrisville. Later, the most popular model came to be known as the Flanders Wonder Home. One could erect it on a lot in a matter of a few days and it came complete with interiors and appliances. The formal front door with its shiny brass finish hardware hung in the street-facing façade three feet above the ground and next to the “pitcher winda” as Pud called it. The door was largely decorative as Pud and Ginger didn’t pay extra for the precast concrete steps with filigree wrought iron rail that led up to it. Fifty feet …
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Pete loved to fish. His preferences were for bait casting and dynamite, although he had tried various schemes involving small makeshift dams on brooks with nets in spillways to catch brookies and browns. The topic Thursday morning in Hardwick, however, was his periodic attempts at trolling. Pete only trolled when he had been drinking heavily. He never trolled in his hometown, perhaps because at the time Morrisville was a dry town and Hardwick wasn’t. In fact no one could remember Pete trolling anywhere except in Mer-Lu’s restaurant, noted for the bottles without labels on the bar and the lack of a printed menu. As Lou — the “Lu” in “Mer-Lu’s — told it, Pete had been drinking alone since mid-afternoon. …
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“I’ss how the rich gits richer,” explained Eddie Purinton, blowing his left nostril onto the ground with his right index finger. “Some newfangle’ plan where ya sell yer cows t’a rich person what’s got taxes ta pay, but ’che git ta keep yer cows and he pays no taxes. Duke Sargeant in the ’stension service ’splained it ta me yesserday.” “I don’ git it,” answered his friend and neighbor Purvis Bettis. “Ya sell ’em yer cows, they pays ya what they’se worth and maybe ya pay ’em sumpin’ monthly for a lease. The rich peoples write the cows off’n their taxes. Works fer me. I never made enough money ta pay no taxes anyhow,” added Eddie. “So they gives ya …
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Hardwood Flats does not appear on most local maps but is used by locals to describe an unmarked space between Elmore, Wolcott, and Worcester. It is a hardscrabble bog of isolated ponds, marshland, and mixed second-growth hardwoods and occasional stands of young evergreens. Walking in the woods one can always hear running water somewhere. Much of its terrain seems to float on an inland sea. Here and there, a few dirt roads, passable except in mud season, wind through the woods, feeding into corduroyed logging roads and then tapering off into hunting trails and deeryards. Occasional year-round dwellings nestle here and there on the passable roads. Hunters or hikers will occasionally run across abandoned farmhouses mouldering in clearings marked only …
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It’s the second Sunday of Advent and Anne Stone braces for Christmas. Anne has been a nurse at Copley Hospital for 48 of her 69 years. As a young woman, she trained at the Jeanne Mance School of Nursing in Burlington and then served next door as a candy-striper at the Bishop Degoesbriand Hospital in the late ’50s when the twin towns of Winooski and Burlington shared three hospitals. She returned home in 1959 and began nursing at Copley for 85 cents an hour when it was still a four-story wood firetrap enmeshed in countless fire escapes Most of the time, Anne loves her work. She has opinions about many of the “advances” in health care, but she keeps them …
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