Vermont 
Country Calendar 
Town-meeting day is often the first 
day of mud season 
by Eleanor A. Ott 
Most of what I’ve learned about 
Vermont living I learned in Lucille 
Cerutti’s kitchen. Lucille and I met 
at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Ver- 
mont, where I teach folk studies and 
she runs the Community Services of- 
fice, helping students solve their per- 
sonal problems. Lucille, like her par- 
ents, has lived in this rural Vermont 
area all of her life, and her special 
heritage colors her daily encounters 
with students as well as neighbors. 
I received my first lesson in country 
ways from Lucille the day I bought 
half a pig and she came out to my 
place to help me deal with the head. 
The result, hog’s head cheese, is not 
unique to Vermont. It is simply part 
of the traditional way of living that 
is still found in Vermont’s rural vil- 
lages. In these rushed times, life in 
such a village is a rare experience, 
rich and coherent. Because of Ver- 
mont’s extremes of weather, each ac- 
tivity, whether work or play, has its 
season. As Lucille has helped me to 
know, the passage of the months creates 
a satisfying cycle of country living. 
Town-meeting day, the first Tues- 
day in March, is often also the first 
day of mud season. At least this is 
the first day that, despite high snow- 
banks and four feet of snow still in 
the woods, we really notice the mud. 
There is no doubt the gravel roads 
As the sap rises with the first 
spring thaw, the task of tapping 
the maple trees gets under way. 
are beginning to thaw. So are the peo- 
ple, who steam up the windows in 
the frame meeting hall that was once 
the Gospel Hollow Congregational 
Church. The meeting begins when 
Sidney Liff raps his gavel, and the 
discussions are joined not only by Ver- 
monters from way back, but also by 
newcomers like me: folks from “down 
country,” or out of state. 
The town meeting is both a political 
affair and a social one, a mixing of 
life styles and generations. Last year 
Eva Morse was reelected town clerk, 
demonstrating that women have their 
voice and function in town affairs. Yet 
it is the women who slip downstairs 
late in the morning session to lay the 
tables and set out the casseroles of 
food brought by townspeople for the 
meeting-day dinner. Each year we sit 
at long tables, passing around the 
bowls of home-baked beans and brown 
bread. Last year I found to my right 
85-year-old Neil Converse, at his 
prime judged the best fiddler in the 
Northeast; on my left sat the new 
woman minister for the town’s two 
churches. 
It is no accident that town-meeting 
day marks the beginning of the Ver- 
mont year. This is the time when the 
season changes. Mercifully, winter has 
given people time to be idle, to knit 
by the fire, to make soup, to work 
jigsaw puzzles, to visit. But with the 
first days of above-freezing tempera- 
tures, as the sun melts back the snow 
to create ice jams and mud, the pace 
of life changes radically. In fact, town- 
meeting day comes none too soon. 
There are trees to tap, buckets to hang 
out in the woods, and then the sap 
Richard W Brown 
Lifelong Vermonters and newcomers 
from out of state attend the 
local town meeting. 
must be collected and boiled into ma- 
ple syrup. It’s a matter of timing, of 
seizing chances as they come. By ne- 
cessity, the work of the day must be 
attuned to the sun, the wind, and the 
weather. 
Lucille describes how sugaring was 
done when she was a child: 
We used to gather sap in wooden buckets. 
If you think aluminum buckets are heavy, 
you should have carried wooden ones. 
We tapped some 500 trees every year, 
and on a good day we might empty each 
of those buckets two or three times. Some- 
times a season can last off and on for 
four or five weeks. And before that we 
had chopped and hauled the wood to burn 
in the evaporator to boil the water out 
of the sap, forty gallons of sap for each 
gallon of syrup. It wasn’t like there wasn’t 
anything to do. 
If you don’t sugar yourself, you at 
least stop by to visit while sap is being 
boiled down at a sugarhouse. Accord- 
Nathan Benn; Woodfln Camp 
73 
