Life in Vermont

Life can be such an adventure.  While we were in Vermont, faculty wives received free education.  I decided to go back to school to get my teacher's certificate. After taking several courses I needed to do my student teaching.  I was interested in the open class room concept.  Some of the classes I had taken related to this idea.  I met a daughter of a friend from our church, Susan Throckmorton.  She had just gotten a job as a teacher in the one room Kirby, Vermont school.  They needed an aid .  I could work as an teacher's aid and get some pay, and do my student teaching at the same time.  Great.

That fall I begun helping out at the one room school.  This really did feel like I had gone way back in time.  There were no real bath rooms.  An out house was attached to the storage room on the side of the building. There were six grades in the school first thru sixth about twenty six to thirty students in all.  We had several students with learning difficulties.  I would be working mainly with these students one on one.  My son Scott was four years old at the time.  He went along with me to the school.  He sat with the first graders colored or listened to their reading.  He had a fine time.

There was one little girl who had difficulties with mathematical concepts.  I remember counting out beans to try to get her to understand numbers.  I also helped students with reading.  The older students helped the younger students with their work too.  It was amazing how well the classroom worked.  We read "Charlotte's Web"  together.  Then we made paper mache animals using balloons and then covering them with the paper mixture.  The students did an amazing job.  Everyone had such fun.

During the winter when it was hard to go outside for recess, we would find interesting things to do.  We learn how to churn milk to make butter. We made lunch together several times. I remember in particular a Valentine Lunch.  It was always a learning experience for the students.

Toward the end of the cold winter, we had to make an announcement to the children that they needed to use the outside holes in the outhouse as the inside holes were frozen and were too close to the top. .That spring I became pregnant with my third child.  The smell of the outhouse and the gerbils' cage was just a little too much for my stomach.  In spite of this I was able to make it through.  Where would I ever have had an experience like that except in rural Vermont.

That was my last winter in the cold North of Vermont.  We moved back to Virginia in time for Lewis to be born in the same hospital as his brothers in Norfolk.  My folks were very happy.  In fact it was because they offered Tink a position running a branch of my father's art gallery that we moved back.  The night that Lewis was due they had a great snow in Northern Vermont.  We would have had to go almost forty miles across the state,in a snow storm,  to reach the hospital where my doctor practiced .  It was a warm night in Norfolk instead.

I will always cherish the time and the adventures we had living in Vermont.  I am grateful that I took that leap of faith and followed my husband.  You never know where you will find your adventures.  Vermont enriched our lives.