E.O. Schaub

Dear Editor,

It has recently come to my attention that our lovely New England farming community is far too charming and bucolic for its own darn good. How, I wonder, is a citizen supposed to get on with the important and difficult business of growing crops, milking, slate quarrying and sugaring, when he or she is constantly being bombarded by requests from Vermont Life photographers to “move a little to the left” and “look a little more rugged and haggard in the next one- but in a good way.”

You know the problems as well as I do. Every autumn our town is overrun with the dreaded Leaf Peepers, peeping at our leaves most indecently. Then the antique hunters arrive, breaking into our storage barns in hopes of finding a charming little shop selling glass milk bottles in which they might arrange flowers for their Soho loft powder rooms, or perhaps a family heirloom rocking chair they might yank from my beneath my dying grandmother’s arthritic fanny.

Every winter, the skiers descend like locusts, wearing parkas made of yak fur and demanding lactose-free ice cream at the diner, asking where the nearest Starbucks/sushi bar/Apple store is and lamenting the failure of civilization to bring sufficient cell phone service to our area as if it ranked slightly above sewage treatment and clean running water. Continue reading Proposal for a New Town Uglification Committee →