StoryCorps in Vermont: A mother and daughter with farming childhoods

StoryCorps brings loved ones together for meaningful conversations about the things that matter most. The StoryCorps mobile tour visited Brattleboro this summer, and recorded conversations with folks from across Vermont and beyond. Today, we hear from a mother and daughter — Janet Bailey and Erica Breen — about life growing up on the farm. Janet shares her memories about growing up in an intentional faith community in Paraguay, and then moving to the states, to a farm in Brattleboro.

Janet Bailey: It was a very different growing up, but my most favorite memories of growing up there was the natural world and growing up with so much agriculture. My dad was one of the main farmers there, and we learned with him all about growing things, harvesting things. My favorite thing to harvest was oranges from the wild orange trees. Wild orange trees in the jungles grow very, very tall, and they are always inhabited by monkeys who like to take bites out of oranges and throw them at people. And so my dad taught us how to climb a tree head up. You go up with your head first, but you don’t come down with your head first, you come down with your feet first.

Erica Breen: So, you’re up in a tree. Do you have a sack to fill, or are you throwing them down to someone?

Janet Bailey: Toss them down to Mom and Dad. Mom would catch them in her apron, and Dad would catch them in his hands. And then my dad was also the dairy farmer, and I remember he always used to milk on Sunday mornings, and I would go and watch him, and he’d be milking the native cows who tended to kick and thrash around a lot because they were used to running out in the prairies not being milked.

Erica Breen: So he was sitting on a stool milking by hand.

Janet Bailey: A three-legged stool. Milking by hand. And they were probably 25 to 30 cows. He was going down the row.

It was in my fingers, it was in myself to grow things. We had been looking for a farm in northern Vermont, thinking that we really wanted to be further away from population, and this farm was on the edge of Brattleboro and in the very southern part of Vermont. The issue for us was that we didn’t have any money. We had $1,000 to our name, and we were looking at farms. It was ridiculous, but we were young and enthusiastic and a little naive, but very full of energy and really passionate about wanting to farm.

And we heard of this opportunity that there was a farmer who wanted to donate his farm and house to the Earth Bridge Community Land Trust, with the stipulation that he be able to stay there and be cared for until he died.

Erica Breen: And he wanted the land to stay in farming.

Janet Bailey: And he wanted the land to stay in farming. And so we were asked if we would like to go visit him and see what that opportunity was like. So we went. It was the fall, and you could hardly see the house, but we found our way up the driveway and through this back door that we had to duck to get under and into a very dark house, old house, and there was Claude, who was in his mid 80s, I believe. Wonderful, wonderful smile, and somebody with a very, very sweet bit and just an old Vermonter, very caring.

The farm was very well cared for. The fields had been very carefully mowed every year. There was no overgrowth pasture taking over the land, and there were flat areas that were good for gardening. And so, of course, we were just really blown away by it. A few days later, we got a call from David and Crystal, who ran the Earth Bridge, and they said, “Claude wants you! Claude wants you to come and be here!” So that was amazing, because he’d interviewed other people, and he had turned them down.

What are your memories of the farmhouse?

Erica Breen: The screen door. The banging screen door. I can picture it, I can hear it, and I can picture it — thick, green with that square screen. And it was pretty saggy. And then that stone doorstep. And then the inside — that was the vertical green boards of that thin door that we would only close when it was really windy in the winter. And then inside that was the regular, thick exterior door with the knob that was falling out of it. And I remember the soapstone sink vaguely.

Janet Bailey: Do you remember the cold, how cold it was at night?

Erica Breen: I know it was cold, but I don’t have a real memory.

Janet Bailey: Dad and I used to have glasses of water that would freeze on the nightstand.

And what are thy memories of growing up on the farm? How did it affect your life?

Erica Breen: It made me.

Janet Bailey: You know that know, but as a child how did you feel?

Erica Breen: I felt lucky. I felt secure. I felt grounded. As I matured, I could see that many of the kids I was in school with did not feel that way, because I knew how to be healthy and how to be involved with the earth, and it was so obvious to me how important that was. So I felt lucky and strong.

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