I have been working on a new book of New England folktales. It won't be published until next year, but that's not unusual. We're often working a full year ahead of time.

I wrote a preface for the book and, of course, it was too long. My editor, Margaret Frith, helped me to shorten it and make it more "focused" for the book.

But, I also like the longer version, too. It's another part in the "story of my life."

So, I want to share the "director's cut" version with all of you.

PREFACE

My love affair with northern New England began in 1947 when my parents took my two younger sisters and I for a ten-day vacation on Malletts Bay at Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont.

We would visit friends of my folks that had a "camp" right on the bay. On Lake Champlain as on other upper New England lakes, a "camp" is a fairly large house or cottage. There is often no heat except for a big stone fireplace, sometimes no hot water heater and more often than not, drinking and cooking water is gotten at a communal well with a hand-pump.

My uncle Frank had a similar place on the shore in Tiverton, Rhode Island just outside of Fall River. His place was called a shore "cottage." It was completely destroyed in the storm surge that accompanied the 1938 Hurricane that hit New England.

The drive from Meriden, Connecticut to Burlington, Vermont was longer than it is today. There was no Interstate Highway 91 then. We drove up through western Connecticut into western Massachusetts, going through such beautiful and quaint towns as Williamstown, Great Barrington and Stockbridge (home of Norman Rockwell) where the Berkshires hinted at mountains to come in Vermont.

And sure enough, right over the border between Massachusetts and Vermont, the Green Mountains began. Majestic and greener than any twelve-year-old could imagine, rising up out of corn-filled meadows dotted with calendar perfect red barns.

We drove through Manchester, Vermont where Abraham Lincoln's only surviving son, Robert Todd, had lived and marveled at Mount Equinox that seemed to touch the top of the sky. In the center of the village was the old hotel, the Equinox House, with its stately white columns. It is still there and still in business.

Soon, the mountains gave way to rolling dairy farmland filled with "KEWS," the old Vermont pronunciation of cows. With so many cows, its no wonder that Vermont cheddar cheese rivaled maple products in the gift shops along the way.

Before we knew it (except for my youngest sister Judie who was at the "are we there yet?" age), we caught sight of Lake Champlain and were soon driving through the campus of the University of Vermont down the hill to downtown Burlington and on out to Malletts Bay.

Ten magical days sped by. I was up at the crack of dawn and out in the rowboat with mist rising from the lake, catching perch which I learned to clean and then had fried for breakfast. I discovered "pepper steaks," a local treat, and french fries doused with malt vinegar, instead of catsup.

We took a day trip to Montreal where everyone spoke French. I ALMOST tamed a real chipmunk that lived in the woodpile next to the "camp."

I became good friends with the young girl next door. (We became pen-pals during the next year.)

We went into Burlington one day to have lunch in a restaurant and to go to the fancy movie theatre, the Flynn. We stopped at farm stands to buy tomatoes and sweet corn. That was the first time I heard the quickly disappearing Vermont accent. "Aiyah" instead of Yeah. "Kews" instead of Cows. "Hewse" instead of House. "Fahm" instead of Farm. I secretly promised myself that when I grew up I'd live in Vermont or at least in upper New England.

During art school, I spent a summer at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. I then entered Weston Priory in Weston, Vermont in 1956. I left the Priory but moved back to Weston in January of 1957. I lived there until 1961. My true introduction to upper New England humor and folk-ways had begun.

It took a while, with Boston, New York City and San Francisco as sidetracks, but in 1972, I moved back North-East and settled in the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee area of New Hampshire. I've lived here ever since. However, I'm not a "local." True, I'm not a "summah-people" either. And I'll never ever be a "native." There are rigid rules about these things. I'm not quite sure what they are. Something about at least both great-grandparents born here or nearby to be considered a native.

But, I don't mind being "that artist fella who writes books and lives up on County Road in that big place behind the gas station."