Member-only story
Firearms, Frontier, Family: We Move to Vermont
When I tell how and why I moved to Vermont in 1978, with my second husband R and our four-month-old baby, a lot depends on who’s listening. Often I start the tale by saying “we found a classified ad in the New York Times and rented a farmhouse, sight-unseen, in Irasburg, ten miles from the Canada border.”
Sometimes I add that the farmhouse, high on a ridge, was uninsulated and took 14 cords of wood per winter to heat it. I never talk about the learning curve for managing a wood furnace in the basement, a Round Oak parlor stove (also fed with wood, but of a different size and shape) in the living room, and a wood-fired cookstove in the kitchen. But I have a scar on my wrist from one of those.
The deeper story begins a year or two before we opted to make that baby.
The First Firearm in Our Lives
R’s best friend in New Jersey, PK, was both a Special Forces veteran (three years, including time solving problems for the Army in Vietnam) and good with machinery. PK could take apart a car engine or a firearm, and then reassemble it, without any pieces left over.
