The Annals of Brattleboro

For the last six hours, I have been utterly absorbed in the history of my small Vermont town, in the form of the Annals of Brattleboro, 1650-1895, compiled and edited by Mary Roger Cabot.*

It’s difficult reading, because it truly is an annal, and not a “true” history.  Historiographers make much of these distinctions, but put quite simply what distinguishes an annal from a history is narrative.  Histories take historical evidence and form a narrative of it, while annals just pile it all together.  This happened, and then this happened.  Just one damn thing after another.  But this is something more: a historiographer’s annal, if you will, since it’s not just a big pile of loosely chronological historical information, it’s also a collection of documents, essays and articles written by many different authors, at different times and at different levels of historical or literary sophistication.

I have always loved Vermont, and I have always loved history, but somehow those two loves never quite intertwined, a mystery that I simply cannot explain.  Chalk it up to the perversity of the human mind.  I have always wondered, though, how old my house is.  The construction is pre-Victorian; the root cellar positively primeval.  My failure to research this, the history of the place I call home, was felt all the more keenly for the fact that I pretty much live on the same block as the Historical Society.  It’s right down the street.  Not even five minutes away.

Throughout reading the Annals I’d experienced one shock of recognition after another.  I knew these places, in a way that I’d never known the places before.  In the past few years I’ve taken to traveling the old back roads, and sighing over old farmhouses, but in fact I live in an old farmhouse, it’s just a farmhouse that was overtaken by a forties-fifties suburban-styled neighborhood.  This is the place that I know better, probably, than any other: one of the two houses that I grew up in, and the house I returned to in adulthood.  It’s the place that I started my life with my lady love, and now it’s the place that I garden, the land that I work, a bond that needs no explanation.

On page 185:

No settlement was made in the valley of the Whetstone Brook above the Estey Sawmill till 1798, when William Harris began one where the old road to Marlboro turns up the hill at West Brattleboro.

(I’m not saying for certain that this is my house, but it does seem likely!  Further findings to follow with the Historical Society Expeditionary Report.)

*Thanks, Google Books!

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Notes for a Winter Grower’s Manifesto, #1

 

Commit yourself to increase, to growth, to a net gain.  This means not using a bunch of power-hungry lights and heaters.  It means being frugal with a dollar, too.  Even if you don’t really need to save the money, do-it-yourself projects are good for the soul, and that’s a lot of what gardening is about, maybe even more so in winter.  Spend time rather than money.

Vermonters tend to drop the “eat local” rhetoric when the snow rolls in, but a windowsill garden, properly planned, can go a long way to enlivening dinners out of the root cellar.  The thing is to yield to nature, and not to try to grow all the same things as in summer, but to create flavor and variety, things that make eating special.  Winter is and always will be a time of pickles and bean soups and potatoes, but a few fresh herbs and some greens can make all the difference.

That said, reserve your finest, warmest, sunniest spot for a favorite, a darling, something precious: a tomato plant, maybe.  If you need to, feed your darling some light, some heat (make sure you cluster all the others around, so they catch whatever leaks out).  Don’t overdo it.  Let it take its time.  What you’re really growing, here, is morale.

I have been convinced by dear friends that living soil is probably better than sterile, even in the greenhouse.  On the other hand, early in December, I lost my pepper plants and my parsley to aphids, who almost certainly smuggled themselves in with living soil from outside.  On the other other hand, despite buying sterile potting mix, I’m seeing a lot of things popping up that I never planted.  I think “microcultures” or “microecologies” are probably possible, but obviously that’s going to take some reading…

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