Mike Labine is now in training to become farm manager at Vermont Shepherd Cheese in Westminster West. He was born in 1992 in a very different world:  Darien, Connecticut, one of the goldcoast suburbs in ready reach of NYC. But what captured his imagination and heart as a young boy was a 100-acre parkland near his home. He roamed and played in that parkland as a boy and remembers seeing a dinosaur. It was a place that fired his imagination.

On September 11, 2023, Katy Emond opened her childcare center called The PUMPKIN PATCH in what was The Putney Inn and Restaurant. Three children were enrolled that day.  As of early October, 2024, 43 are now enrolled and she now has earned a licensed capacity of 59. These children are from 39 families living in Putney, Dummerston, Brattleboro, Westminster and Bellows Falls. Through sheer force of will this high-powered woman and equally energetic husband Josh Emond have answered the needs of families for childcare, a service that frees those parents to work during the day while also offering their children care and early education.

Up until late August, 2024, eighteen year old Django Grace lived his whole life on Williams Street in Brattleboro with his parents Zak Grace, his mother Jana Zeller and his younger brother Desi (who, like Django, will graduate from BUHS). Django graduated in June of this year, giving a heartfelt and dramatic graduation address to his class and families.

Apple/ginger/raspberry pie is River’s favorite, but then there’s apple, blueberry or pumpkin pies when each is in season around Putney. Then there’s chocolate cream pies and decorated cakes parents order for kids’ birthdays or for any kind of celebration. “And we get delirious around here at Thanksgiving and Christmas.” And who is we? River and her mother Katie Rice. They are both bakers (Katie is also a supervisor) for the owners of The Putney General Store – Mike and Kim Cosco right there in the center of town.

Kevin Gordon lives in Putney. He’s 61, a slim, wiry guy with a blue Jeep Wrangler and a motorcycle out back. He gets out of bed around 11:30 at night after a normal 8-hour sleep and drives a few miles down Rte 5 to the C and S Wholesale Grocers delivery docks. Around 1:00, he begins another night’s driving into New England delivering palletized groceries. He’s been driving the big rigs since 1987.

Rod Winchester and his late wife Doreen started Rod’s Mobil on Route 5 in Putney Center in 1967, the same year their son Greg was born. Known in the area for honest customer service and skilled technicians, they made a name for themselves there on busy Rte 5.

Drive around Brattleboro and surrounding towns and you’ll see “Help Wanted” signs everywhere. Many have been in place for months. Electricians and carpenters with big and small businesses can’t find help. Signs outside C&S Grocers at the north end of town display huge help-wanted signs with significant incentives. One organization in town that is working to help solve the problem, while solving others, is The Ethiopian Community Development Council (ECDC).

Helen and Jen O’Donnell live at Bunker Farm in Dummerston along with their husbands and five children under the age of nine, 45 Red Angus-Hereford beef cattle and their 10-12 annual calves, 6 heritage-fancy hybrid breeding pigs and their annual 30-60 piglets, 800 – 1,000 Cornish Cross meat chickens, 12 laying hens, 12 Swedish Blue and Peking ducks, 3 Lion’s Mane rabbits, 4 cats, 1 dog, quite a few fish for the kids,  170 acres of land (made up of a ½ acre pond, 70 acres of meadows, that in total comprise 6 hay and grazing fields, 100 acres of mixed woodland holding a professionally managed many-acre sugarbush, two greenhouses FILLED every Spring with unusual starter flowering perennials, two houses, an antique barn, a state-of-the-art sugarhouse with attached storage barns… Life is just busting out all over the place.

In 1946, that’s 78 years ago, just after WWII, Jack Tarmy started driving a lumber truck making deliveries of lumber he had milled in his Brattleboro mill to the Boston area.

In your home here in SE Vermont, do you have a stretch cord with hooks on either end to hold a bundle of things together or maybe stretch swimwear stored away for summer? Or maybe a Covid mask, diapers with stretch fasteners for baby, a box of stretchable bandages in the bathroom cabinet, athletic shorts? If so, you know something about what Lisa Breault, one of roughly eighty employees at the Fulflex plant at the north end of Brattleboro, does. They make, she makes and is part of the manufacturing process to make stretchy, elasticized threads which they ship to the makers of all the above products and an endless list of others, worldwide.

The Windham Solid Waste Management District – which includes eighteen Windham County towns – was established at its present 29-acre location in 1995 when it closed its landfill and became a recycling center. Eight years later, in 2003, Dick Petrie signed on to be one of the employees doing the work out in the yard and inside the covered M.R.F. (Materials Recovery Facility).   He’s been there ever since.  That’s 21 years when he’s been keeping 7 or 8 acres given over to recycling everything eighteen towns throw his way.

60 miles of tar roads, 32 miles of gravel roads, 30 bridges, 35 miles of sidewalks, 645 culverts, 2,000 drainage structures and the piping to connect them all, maintenance of all road signs. Add to that: filling in potholes, the whole issue of drainage of heavy rains we’ve been getting, pothole repairs, laying new surfaces on existing roads, regrading dirt roads, painting traffic lines on streets and shall I add snowplowing, mudseason? I could go on. The town employs twelve guys to look after that worklist and more. Gary Corey is one of them, and he’s the first to say it takes every guy to pull this off.

 While any of the 160 or so employees at The Coop could be the focus of this profile as they all have their stories, this profile is about Anna Edson. And as such, this is a profile of a sausage maker, a whole LOT of sausages.

With a Class A Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) in hand, Stephanie Wood has been driving trucks for the Cota and Cota Heating Oil Company headquartered in Bellows Falls for just shy of the last three years. Stephanie is a robust,  gentle woman in her early 30’s, with bright shiny eyes.

Dana Temple, the son of Ed and Betsy Temple, was born in 1969 with Spina Bifida. He was brought up in his family’s farm a few miles north of Putney Center. He still lives there with his 91 year old father Ed in the house his grandfather built in the early 1940’s.

At 7:30 AM on February 1, a petite Viv Woodland arrived at her workstation at the main Post Office in Brattleboro to get her delivery readout for the day. She would deliver mail to 400 homes in town: 211 flats (magazines, advertising brochures, pamphlets), 577 letters and 110 packages (including a small heating stove weighing just under 70 pounds and a package from an Italian art store.)

 Suzie Brunswick is and has been an operating-room nurse at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital since 1976 - 47 years and 9 months to be exact.

  Kevin Waters is a driver for Ruggiero Trash Removal in Bellows Falls.  Right around 9:30 every Wednesday he pulls his truck onto our dirt road in Westminster West where fifteen or so families have lined up our trash and recycling bins. He and his assistant then empty our row of eighteen or so trash cans, those of our neighborhood here on Old Codding Road. 

 Dan Deitz lives in his own home on a dirt road in Westminster West. So do his mother and four (of eight) siblings, each with his or her own home and three acres of land purchased in the early 60’s by their parents to start a new life in Vermont, having left Bridgeport, Connecticut. 

 If you own a snowblower, a chain saw, a string trimmer or any number of other small machines to keep your place up, chances are you know Kurt Jillson. He’s the bushy-bearded red-headed guy in a baseball cap who is always up, always cheery, always working in the basement at Brown and Roberts Hardware Store on Main Street in Brattleboro.