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You Can Never Afford Them (“Country” 7)
Moving to Vermont, the book we trusted most was “Five Acres and Independence.” It convinced us we could handle country life and eat well, too. If only there’d been a guidebook to family life that mapped the changes ahead!
We didn’t make much fuss about getting officially married — after all, R and I had “been together” for six years by then, and since neither of us practiced any organized religion, our Vermont justice-of-the-peace ceremony was more an official status sort of divider, and less a statement of hope or conviction. Although really, I am sure we both expected to be married to each other forever. That’s what the vows said, and it sounded good to us!
Still, there’s a pithy local saying about how you can’t “become” a Vermonter just by moving to the Green Mountain State:
“If your cat had kittens in the oven, would you call them muffins?”
And the Christmas Eve marriage didn’t undo the past we’d brought with us: two “pasts,” his and mine. Any impartial observer would have scored our chances of a long and happy marriage pretty low. Optimistic then as I am now, I didn’t catch on to what the past meant until about a decade later, sitting in the living room of a young woman pastor, studying the chart she’d created of the marriages in my family’s history … and at the time, it never occurred to me to…
