Grandma on the phone. My daughters 
call me, we check in, we want to know 
what’s going on. If I’m not talking to 
my older son, I’m on the phone with 
his wife. Every week or so I call my 
younger son, who is working out in Idaho, 
so he’ll know what’s happening here and 
we’ll know what’s happening to him. 
When Lucille was a child, her father 
was a shepherd for a large merino 
sheep farm. This was before the De- 
pression, while Vermont wool was still 
able to compete with the large sheep 
ranches out West. Lucille gestures to- 
ward the mountain with the fire tower 
visible from her kitchen window: 
We used to take three thousand sheep 
in the summertime; we’d drive the sheep 
through town, drive them to Spruce 
Mountain and stay all summer. It was 
all great big open meadows up there. 
Going, we’d be on the road to Pigeon 
Pond. It took days to get there. We were 
kids, and time was forever anyway. It 
didn’t matter to us, we were going for 
our summer fun. All these things we’re 
doing, we always did together. Dosy, my 
sister who now lives in Arizona in the 
winter, is four years older than I am. 
And Donny, who was killed out West 
working lumbering when he was only 
twenty, Donny was just eleven months 
older than I am. So Donny and I were 
more together then, ’cause Dosy was al- 
ways the good one. We were very near 
Pigeon Pond, that had a beautiful sandy 
beach. That’s where we went swimming; 
oh it was just a great old time. You know, 
our relatives used to come up from Mas- 
sachusetts and spend some time up there. 
We had a trailer where Ma did the cook- 
ing, otherwise we had these tents that 
we lived in. Got to know a lot of what 
went on in the world when I was up 
there. 
In those days, forty-five years ago, 
most of Vermont was open land, only 
10 percent tree covered. Now the sit- 
uation is reversed, and young trees 
cover the hills and fields. Today cows 
have replaced sheep, and farming is 
precarious, with the versatile hill farm 
still depending on its variety and flexi- 
bility to survive the vicissitudes of 
weather and inflation. 
Both in June and in later summer, 
it was time for gathering in the hay. 
Lucille recalls that 
putting hay up in bales is a comparatively 
recent thing. We used to put hay into 
the barn by the forkful, and it packed 
down ever so tight; the hay didn’t breathe 
then the way bales do now. Come along 
the end of June, early July, depending 
on the weather, they would cut the hay 
and gather it into windrows with the dump 
