All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

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About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

Reborn on the Fourth of July

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“Reborn on the Fourth of July” originally aired on WAMC on July 4th, 2007.  Click on the WAMC logo to listen to the audio version of this article.

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E.O. Schaub

The fourth of July is coming— and it’s a good thing. This has been a tough year for our family, what with my father-in-law’s passing from cancer in December, the requisite bout of seemingly endless winter illness that comes of having two small, school-age children, and a local economic climate that is causing everyone we know to rethink whether staying in the sticks is really worth it… or even possible.

I’m reminded of the local joke about “Moonlighting in Vermont.” Despite the fact that a Vermont existence sounds idyllic to folks who live elsewhere, the reality is often something else again. Never mind the hard winters… almost everyone we know faces a never-ending struggle to make living here make financial sense. As my husband likes to say, it’s hard to enjoy the famous Vermont “Quality of Life” if you’re working 24 hours per day.

But then, just when we seem ready to despair, and pack up our assorted belongings, kids and animals for more lucrative and suburban climes, summer always seems to arrive just in time. Continue reading Reborn on the Fourth of July →

Visiting the Great Root Bear

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I’m not sure what it says about me that I asked for- and got- a rotating black plastic composter for Mother’s Day (Woo-hoo! Party at our house!) but it only seemed fair that when Father’s Day rolled around, my husband should get what he wanted: a family trip to the A&W.

 

This is just a little more complicated than it might at first sound, because the nearest, and frankly, the only A&W we know of is located in the summer tourist town of Lake George, a good forty-five minute drive away from our home in Vermont. As it happened, this was good, as it gave us the opportunity to have a lengthy conversation with our four-year-old as to whether a root beer float constituted a dessert or a beverage, what in fact root beer was, and whether she could have a lemonade too (no). This was followed by a conversation with our nine year old as to why it was okay to eat this fast food.

 

“I thought fast food was bad,” she said with that wonderful knack kids have for distilling everything you’ve ever told them in all it’s infinite subtleties down to a single blunt point.

 

“Well yes… it is…” I said, wondering for the four millionth time what I was going to say and whether my anticipated explanation would really make logical sense, or simply be fodder for the “my-parents-were-big-fat-hypocrites” therapy sessions some decades from now. “Well. The thing about fast food is that it is not good for you. And so we shouldn’t eat it all the time. But this is a special restaurant that is Daddy’s favorite. So this is a treat.”

 

And how. For a family that defines McDonald’s as “Convenient Public Restroom,” this was big stuff. Continue reading Visiting the Great Root Bear →

When You People is Us- Chemical Soup Part 2

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E.O. Schaub

 

Okay— pet peeve time. Last night I found myself at a meeting, and for those of us who have spent any length of time at public meetings, we all know there are two kinds: those which are boooooooooooring, and those at which emotions are running high, for one reason or another. This one was the latter.

 

The thing I hate about the non-boring kind of meeting is that people say all kinds of things they wouldn’t, if not for the heat of the argument, or the intensity of their feeling about the subject at hand. At least, that’s how I like to think about it. So when suddenly the fellow next to you gets all red in the face and publicly says he’s had it, and he’s moving to Pluto, and he’s taking his Zamboni with him, and to heck with all the duck-billed platypuses it helps, I think, to put it in that kind of context, (rather than to give in and publicly call him a duck-billed dunderhead, which, surprisingly, never actually helps.)

 

But back to last night.

 

The meeting to which I refer was the eagerly-awaited informational meeting regarding the herbicide incident which occurred at our local elementary school (see Chemical Soup). I was late to the meeting, which meant I sheepishly scurried in and sat down in the nearest available seat. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized the room had fairly neatly divided itself down the middle along party lines, as if a scrimmage were about to start: the Defensive Farmers versus the Pro-active Parents. Ooooooh, I thought. This is going to get ugly. I found myself wishing there was a third place to sit- if for no other reason than to avoid getting hit when the tomatoes and rotten eggs started flying. Continue reading When You People is Us- Chemical Soup Part 2 →