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David Moats: Tapping the past -- VTDigger
https://vtdigger.org/2025/03/19/david-moats-tapping-the-past/There has always been a tendency to romanticize rural living, despite the daily struggle of wresting a living from the soil.
A very thoughtful essay on times past and now.
Sugaring season is when Vermonters participate in that cherished rural tradition, passed down through the generations and connecting them again with the land and the seasons.
Much has changed over the years — the plastic tubing and reverse osmosis used in sugaring today — and also with agriculture as a whole. But connecting with those traditions is what many of us who came to Vermont in the 1970s were trying to do. We were trying to connect with the generation of our grandparents, who came of age in an era before the automobile, before radio and television, when a significant proportion of Americans lived on the farm. In Vermont some of them were gathering and boiling sap.
There has always been a tendency to romanticize rural living, despite the daily struggle of wresting a living from the soil. Those picturesque hill farms that consist now of meadows, woods and miles of stone walls were often just scraping by — stubborn efforts at subsistence farming, sometimes successful but often marginal. There’s a reason those farms aren’t there anymore.
In America back then a significant percentage of the population fell into the category of what may be called the peasantry. Peasant is a word with a pejorative connotation, and in the United States, other words are used, also pejorative: hillbilly, rube, redneck, hick. Sometimes these rural folks were tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
. . .
Much has changed over the years — the plastic tubing and reverse osmosis used in sugaring today — and also with agriculture as a whole. But connecting with those traditions is what many of us who came to Vermont in the 1970s were trying to do. We were trying to connect with the generation of our grandparents, who came of age in an era before the automobile, before radio and television, when a significant proportion of Americans lived on the farm. In Vermont some of them were gathering and boiling sap.
There has always been a tendency to romanticize rural living, despite the daily struggle of wresting a living from the soil. Those picturesque hill farms that consist now of meadows, woods and miles of stone walls were often just scraping by — stubborn efforts at subsistence farming, sometimes successful but often marginal. There’s a reason those farms aren’t there anymore.
In America back then a significant percentage of the population fell into the category of what may be called the peasantry. Peasant is a word with a pejorative connotation, and in the United States, other words are used, also pejorative: hillbilly, rube, redneck, hick. Sometimes these rural folks were tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
. . .