This is the sixth of a series of little books describing what life was like for a little girl in rural Vermont during the 1940s. The one-room school, the tar-paper hunting shack on the mountain, all the animals that were part of my growing up years, the people that made life what it was back then, the little chapel, the woods and meadows that graced my life and the backyard gardening that fed us throughout the year-these I have written about in my earlier books. They were part of the 1940s Vermont I knew. Grampa's and Gramma's farm was a small dairy farm. Long before my time Grampa had a...

We walked to school. This was no badge of merit; it was an accepted fact. Rain or shine, snow or sleet, temperatures well below freezing with a crisp wind, it didn't matter. We walked to school because that was the only way we'd get there. School was about a mile from home. Today the odometer measures just a little over three-quarters of a mile, but the hilltops have been gouged away, the dips have been filled and raised, and corners have been straightened to expedite today's speeding traffic. In those days, the road was a narrow dirt road. The few vehicles that used it kicked up a wake of...

Blue Ridge stands at the northeast side of the basin where Rutland City and its environs are situated. My home on Post Road in rural Rutland Town was a short distance from the mountain. I could see the mountain from my home. It was always there, as if watching over me like a great and comforting mother figure. Psalm 121 begins, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." That is how that mountain has always felt to me. It was almost a spiritual presence in my life during my growing up years in the 1940s. I...

We were country kids. Barefoot in the summer, warmly dressed in woolen snowsuits and rubber overshoes in the winter, we spent most of our playtime outdoors. Although we each had home chores to do, some of which you'll learn about in this book, we also had a lot of play time. We were energetic kids, creative, too. With the exception of perhaps a homemade swing, a wagon or doll carriage and a few sand-pile toys, there was no playground equipment. The whole outdoors was our playground. Interwoven throughout our days during our childhood years were cows and horses, dogs and cats, chickens, pigs,...

Folks Around Home is a window into the past, a view of life as it was in rural Vermont in the 1940s. This little book is about people-the people in my neighborhood, the people who came to our door, the people who helped to shape my life. My childhood was during difficult financial times. Yet we did not consider ourselves poor. We had a wealth of family and community that enriched my growing up years. Folks Around Home is the fourth book in a series.

One could say it was a time of hardships. The Great Depression had hit the lives and pocketbooks of so many. It was so with my parents as they began their marriage and little family. It was so in 1935 when I was born. I don't remember those hardest times. But then came World War II, when I was six years old. I remember those early 1940s-the war-time food rationing and gas rationing and "making do or doing without." We survived those years quite well. Money was still tight after the war, partly because of my father's poor health then. But my parents lived frugally and taught us to do likewise....