Ghosts in Vermont: A True Story

The last time I visited Vermont, I put a glass of little yellow daisies on my grandmother's grave. The glass was a big, thick Ronald McDonald glass I bought at garage sale along the road, for a nickel. It was all I could afford. We had just enough money to make it back to Florida, after a trip to Maine that turned out to be much more expensive than we had anticipated. My grandmother and I had a troubled relationship, and I could imagine her bitter sneer. I visit her grave once in 26 years and bring her wilted field daisies in a McDonald's glass. I tried to put a good spin on it, telling her I just wanted to remind her of when I was six and brought her dandelions sticking out of a milk bottle.

As we walked away from her grave, I looked up and saw an amoeba-shape made out of pure light floating so low in the sky it was well below the tree line. My mind immediately summoned up an image of Ruth Ketcham, an old lady who lived in Prunewhip when I was a little girl. I hadn't actually known her, and had forgotten her very existence for the past 20 years, so it was a surprise to see her so clearly now. She had had a long pointy chin that stuck out from her face like a shelf.

Two days later we went back to the cemetery. My husband wanted to make some rubbings of gravestones dating from the 1700s. I wandered over to my grandmother's grave. To my bewilderment, all the water had drained out of the big glass, which was now crazed into an intricate fissured web I had never seen except in a glass of water that was left outside one bitterly cold winter night. I could imagine nothing that would cause a glass to break in such a way, on this peaceful June weekend. I felt bereft. Was my grandmother still so angry, after all these years, that she pulled off a supernatural act of rejection? If Ruth Ketcham, who had been a tired old Baptist, was drifting through the air as pure light, anything was possible.

That was years ago. Now I think my grandmother was reassuring me about the after life, her and Ruth Ketcham.

After Visiting the Old Cemetery in North Bennington

I heard a woman say to her children,

"Be quiet! You'll wake the dead!"

New England has so many -

Revolutionary war soldiers under

crumbling headstones mottled with lichen,

marble lambs for babies who didn't

make it through the winter,

"Beloved Mothers,"

Old men who finally missed

the morning milking.

They deserve their long

unbroken sleep,

who fought such bitter winters,

got their crops planted and

harvested in such short summers,

never had much to do with.

I knew them,

I too was told not to wake them up.

(boots and corsets gone,

they drift among the buttercups)

Excerpt from The Prunewhip Chronicles

Prunewhip's unswerving devotion to rectitude, duty, propriety - the life and death struggle to be clean, normal, and virtuous at all times - turned everyone into cowering hypocrites.
Children were frequently reminded that God was watching us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
and one extra day on leap years. God was watching me when I sat on the toilet reading a Nancy Drew book, picking my nose, and wiping the boogers off underneath the sink. Clearly my relationship with God was ruined. He might be extending love and guidance to other little children, undoubtedly He was, but not to me, or to Dickie Shaw who tried to talk girls into playing doctor with him. Dickie Shaw and I would be in Hell together.
Fortunately there were other chinks in the wall, some involving grownups. Crimes and misdemeanors committed by denizens of Bennington College didn’t count. Those people came from some other planet, and only served as a spectator sport. One professor got drunk on a summer night and sat on his roof playing a guitar and singing "I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now" over and over again. The lucky few who actually witnessed this event told the story over and over again, an almost unrestrained joy shining through their disapproving faces.
But the really interesting deviations arose amongst the townspeople themselves. Only a few were spectacular - such as Mrs. Whitaker’s petrified cat turds, or Mr. Cushman’s descent into madness - these were the Hope Diamonds of local gossip. The lesser gems - the fact that Kaki Peterson’s husband drank, and that Melanie Woodworth spent last summer at the Florence Crittendon Home of Redeeming Love in Burlington, and was not visiting her aunt in Minnesota, as her parents proclaimed. - these were the bits of information which kept people going from day to day.
Some people were outcasts no matter what they did, such as Clover Sweet, the garbage collector who was half Negro and lived alone in a small house in the woods. People praised Clover for doing an excellent job of collecting garbage and always being very polite. He was the most invisible man in town after his garbage route was finished. In all the years I lived in Prunewhip, I can never recall meeting Clover at the grocery store or the post office. Perhaps he had Rural Free Delivery, and drove out of town for groceries and hardware, to some cosmopolitan town such as Albany, 45 minutes away, where other Negros were known to live. It was my personal opinion that Clover was burdened as much by his name as by his ethnic parentage. Normal people had names like Arthur Whitman or Jimmy Beavis. Any guy named Clover Sweet would have been doomed to extinction no matter what. In later years it has occurred to me that Clover may have been a great yogi whose sadhana was to live in the woods in Vermont and collect the garbage of the unilluminated, thus bestowing his blessings upon us and assisting our eventual delivery from Vermont and the 1950s.

Front and Center

1.Immortality In Vermont in 1953

where the TV station
had a program for kids,
Freddy Freihoffer’s Breadtime tales,
one guy with an easel who drew
Freddy and his friends,
while Mom, if there was a mom,
fixed meatloaf, stringbeans, baked potatoes,
a little scoop of orange sherbet for dessert.
When we ran out to the side yard of
stars and fireflies,
drinking in the night like mossy wine,
we never knew we would end as
pictures in a family album,
lined up against Mr. Balmer’s fence in our
jerseys, overalls, and little clodhopper shoes.

2. Easter

Sunday and there she is in front of the new Buick
in a pink dress with a white peter pan collar,
a straw hat with a round humped top, a short brim,
pink ribbon tied under her chin,
same color as the dress,
holding the little pink plastic purse
feminists poets will one day immortalize,
wearing white ankle socks and
patent leather shoes,
safe at this moment,
from overly friendly uncles with whiskey breath,
face stubble like razors against her skin,
from the silent rage of her father,
the too bright smile of her aproned mother.

3. Grandmother

Wears a black straw hat
festooned with plaster cherries,
above a grim face which seems
in retrospect to know
she is being recorded wrongfully,
not the true story.
This blue serge, corseted woman
made love, gave birth to children,
her skin gleaming with sweat,
it’s only later she had to
stand in front of the house
wearing a silly hat.

Old New England Houses

smelled of cedar chests
and lemon oil.
High ceilings,
polished wooden floors,
endless repeating
clusters of grapes
along the walls.
There were no random objects
dropped behind the couch,
jammed into the back of a drawer.
Each thing was known, counted,
laid away in its rightful place.
Although some were mysterious -
a breast pump?
My dead grandfather's
two unsmoked cigars.

What if Our Struggles Turn Out to be Enough

What if our struggles turn out to be enough
in the end,
long after we’re over winning and losing?
What if the money lasts,
the music, the food, the love?
What if we find ourselves in Bardos of
peace and justice,
when we’re old and hopeless possibilities
off to one side
like leaves of lettuce and slices of tomato?

Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie


"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you

think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing.

Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs

that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to

fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs

that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked

you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to

sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing

are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the

other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own

kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at

\you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a

long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves

and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running

over with such no good songs as that anyhow."

- Woody Guthrie.

flowers

Wild violets grow beneath a lilac tree. They bloom at the same time. Moss on trunks of maple trees, festooned with tiny flowers. I had to put my eyes right up to the moss to see them. Gnarled trunks. Lilies of the valley alongside the house. Indian paint brush, black-eyed susans, daisies, asters and buttercups growing in the fields. Golden rod in the fall - the fields ablaze! A flowering quince - rich and complex, deeply hued, like a bush in a Renaissance painting. A bed of peonies. Flowers planted in order of height: blue bells, forget-me-knots, sweet williams, phlox, and then an honor guard of gladiolas. Dandelions. What symphony....