Our move to Hartland

So we moved to East Hartland in the fall of 1956. The air was a lot cleaner there, and any night when there were no clouds, the Milky Way stood out quite brightly as a wide band right across the sky. It seemed like the ideal place to raise children. The moral atmosphere seemed good perhaps due to the presence of the Bethany Lutheran Free Church, which was mostly Norwegean.

Gifford Jr, who had begun first grade in the town of Burlington, continued school in West Hartland by bus, and I think they still had "double sessions". It was tough on him, and for that reason, I don't think he did so well.

The three girls took the larger room upstairs, and the two boys the smaller room. For an office, I used the small room upstairs that had been an extra perhaps kitchen as it had a sink. We could not get a private telephone line as there were not enough phone lines running up to East Hartland. So we had to get a party line, and the only catch was that there was a lady in town there who seemed to spend all her time on our phone line. I was forced to build a little battery operated phone line detector, that monitored wheter the line was busy or not. If it was busy, a red light would remail lit; when the lady hung up, you could hear the relay "click", and the light would go out. I'd grab the phone quickly then, as that was my chance. This provoked the lady as she liked to make a series of long phone calls one after the other.

The pastor of the Bethany Lutheran Free Church called on us a number of times to get us to go there, but I always declined. Instead, we attended the First Congregatinal Church in the center of town, just a few doors away from our place. In this way we got acquainted with a lot of the people in the town. You know that prior to the Revolution, for some time, the Congragational churches were the official church of the state, and that is the reason that many of them are in the very center of the town, on what one would expect to be community property. They also are the direct descentants of the churches of the pilgrems.

To the north of our house, and still on our property, was a birch swamp, complete with ferns. The other side of the swamp was a stone wall, separating our property from the Stones, an elderly couple. He was legally blind, and when he drove his car, he drove very slowly, in the center of the road. I think he was a retired insurance executive, and he complained to me that he had to provide the finances for his grandchildren to go to college. To the northeast was the hand dug well, the source of our water. The far northeast corner of our lot was a very old dump, with ancient bottles, etc. Today's "collector" items. I had to get rid of it all. We had no trash service, but I got an old truck and hauled all our rubbish up to the town dump, the use of which is free.
The old truck was a 1936 International pickup. It had some unusual features, such as the gas tank was under the front seat. It also had a character all its own (and so does yours truly), and we didn't always hit it off so well. One day it wouldn't start. I tried every known remedy, including cleaning the carburetor. Finally I took the rather desperate step of pouring a little gasoline into the carburetor. I turned on the key, stepped on the starter, and there was a tremendous explosion. I remained sitting on the gas tank, astonished. I opened up the hood. I found the dip stick bent over double. The force of the explosion had driven the dip stick up against the inside of the hood, and bent it over double!

I had spent several hours in this endeavor, without positive results. Finally, it occurred to me. How about the gas? I took up the seat cushion, opened the gas tank cover, and lo and behold! Virtually out of gas.

Pretty little chipmonks lived in our stone wall.

I need to quit now.