Vermont Almanac: Stories From & For the Land, Volume IV, contains another wonderful collection of stories, information, artwork, recipes, odd corners of Vermont history, and a chronicle of last year’s weather.
With fifty-nine contributing writers, the book sings in different voices, includes poems, essays, information about Vermont wild’s flora and fauna, and all the crops Vermonters plant their livelihoods on, including cannabis, corn, and corpses (in an article about green burials). As always, there’s a “Timber Year in Review”—not just interesting, but a good reminder that the trees that make the Green Mountains green are as important to the state’s economy as to the landscape we inhabit.
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Variety
Variety is one of the great pleasures of the almanac. Many of the stories are about the people who currently work the land: a retired schoolteacher in Dorset who now specializes in growing alliums: onions, shallots, garlic, and leeks; a family dairy farm whose milk is used primarily in ice cream and yogurt; a family that sells its Vermont-grown Christmas trees directly to its well-established customer base on Long Island, New York.
Information
There’s also fascinating information about the land and the landscape, including one about the geology that formed the place we call Vermont, and another about the seven distinct types of historic barns typically found in Vermont, and stories about people who restore, renovate and repurpose them.
Instructions
The book also includes instructions for tapping a maple, and–for those who have beaver meat in their freeze–a recipe for using it in cheesesteak. I bet it would be just as good with venison, for those who tagged a deer this year. (Sadly, not me.)
Stories
Some of the stories about Vermonters that I particularly liked include “A Vermonter in Paris,” about how Will Wallace-Gusakov took his Vermont-honed skills as a timber framer to Paris, where he spent six months helping rebuild the roof of Notre Dame. This year’s Almanac has an article featuring some of Vermont’s lost ski areas, a project of the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe. Verandah Porche has collected the voices of Guilford residents who survived Mr. Ladd, the teacher of the mid-century experimental one-room school for the town’s seventh and eighth graders. And in “The Corn Mother,” Abenaki Chief Don Stevens recounts how a mother of hungry children gave her life to the Creator, who in turn feeds the people in perpetuity, and how each kernel of corn is a seed that’s been touched by thousands of ancestors, and if handled properly, will feed thousands yet to come.
Artwork
The Almanac is also graced with artwork. In addition to Kathleen Kolb’s cover painting of blue light in winter, Mary Simpson’s vibrant block prints grace the monthly chapters, and reproductions of paintings from Lyman Orton’s collection of Vermont vernacular life in the early twentieth century are found here and there. Additionally, there are wonderful photographs.
This is just a partial list of what’s in a book filled with essential, scientific, artistic, quirky, and entertaining information and makes a great gift.
The Almanac is available at bookstores and online from vermontalmanac.org.
I want to buy a copy of this interesting book .
There are copies at Everyone’s Books.