Mud Season: How One Woman's Dream of Moving to Vermont, Raising Children, Chickens and Sheep, and Running the Old Country Store Pretty Much Led to One Calamity After Another

by Ellen Stimson

Overview

Living the dream of the endless vacation

In self-deprecating and hilarious fashion, Mud Season chronicles Stimson’s transition from city living to rickety Vermont farmhouse. When she decides she wants to own and operate the old-fashioned village store in idyllic Dorset, pop. 2,036, one of the oldest continually operating country stores in the country, she learns the hard way that “improvements” are not always welcomed warmly by folks who like things just fine the way they’d always been. She dreams of patrons streaming in for fresh-made sandwiches and an old-timey candy counter, but she learns they’re boycotting the store. Why? “The bread,” they tell her, “you moved the bread from where it used to be.” Can the citified newcomer turn the tide of mistrust before she ruins the business altogether? Follow the author to her wit’s end and back, through her full immersion into rural life—swapping high heels for muck boots; raising chickens and sheep; fighting off skunks, foxes, and bears; and making a few friends and allies in a tiny town steeped in history, local tradition, and that dyed-in-the-wool Vermont “character.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781581572612
Publisher:	Countryman Press, The
Publication date:	10/06/2014
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	1,096,603
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ellen Stimson is blessed with a wild pack of children; not-so-wild but completely adorable husband; and a very civilized group of chickens, dogs, and cats. Lately she's decided that she really wants a pig. She writes about the whole catastrophe from an old farmhouse in Vermont.

Table of Contents

Prologue 11

Chapter 1 Vermont 13

Chapter 2 The Armed Robbery 29

Chapter 3 Gertrude and the Goat 56

Chapter 4 Peltier's 64

Chapter 5 Bats and Bears and Skunks. Oh My 82

Chapter 6 Arrested Again 95

Chapter 7 Holidays and Holy Days 111

Chapter 8 The HQCS 128

Chapter 9 In Like a Lamb 161

Chapter 10 Mud Season 180

Chapter 11 The Alamo 192

AfterWords 211

In Memoriam 247

Acknowledgments 253

Editorial Reviews

Stimson's predictable tale of uprooting to Vermont after an idyllic fall vacation has its fun moments, including "choosing the cheese" and experiencing Mud Season, the time in early spring when "the snow opens up the hard, bare ground beneath it," but never enough of them to outweigh the plodding narrative. Initial visions of a picturesque small-town life are immediately sidetracked by the day-to-day of historic home renovations and management troubles at the "Horrible Quaint Country Store" that Stimson and her husband decide to open. Natural descriptions provide moments of serenity: "There seems to be a whole, separate world just below the snowy, melty surface." Such instances, unfortunately, are often bogged down by repetitive footnoting. Stimson's story, which concludes with bankruptcy negotiations and a promise never to buy a store again, is fraught with anxiety and missteps. More than thirty appended pages of recipes, including three pet memoriam, supply cheerier resolutions than the story commands. Such additions detract from what would otherwise be a bittersweet story, making this book far more complicated, and less enjoyable, than it should be. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ellen Stimson is funny. Darned funny. And she knows how to spin a good, old-fashioned yarn. Stimson tells her tales with clear-eyed, self-deprecating humor, which makes Mud Season a breeze to read in a single sitting."

Washington Post

"Get your schadenfreude ready. Stimson’s fish-out-of-water memoir is chockablock with self-deprecating, belly-laughable vignettes. Not since Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I (1945) has anybody seemed more ill-suited to country life. And yet this born-and-bred Midwestern city dweller, having run up an enormous tab at her local Vermont country store, thinks, “Maybe I could run a quaint country store.” Visions of herself, husband John, and their Bernese Mountain dog, Eloise, greeting delighted customers with homemade breads and soups and cozy woodstove fires eclipsed all logic. They bought the store. Which sounds ominously like the phrase, they bought the farm. Which it may as well have been in the case of this former wholesale book businesswoman who seemed hell-bent on proving she had more money and credit than brains. Naturally, first thing, Stimson rearranged the store to suit her well-intentioned yuppie sensibilities. The locals stayed away in droves. Indeed, her first customers—staid, khaki-and-sensible-shoe-wearing native Vermonters—took one look at her “swingy” orange and purple outfit accessorized with jangly jewelry and thought she was a fortune teller. The experience foretold a very long acclimation and heaps of hilarious anecdotes. As for this book—come for the humor, stay for the recipes."

Booklist [STARRED REVIEW]

In her debut, former bookseller Stimson recounts relocating her family from St. Louis to the bucolic beauty of Vermont. The author and her husband John fell in love with Vermont on a getaway weekend. Years later, financially stable and in need of a change, they settled into a small Vermont town to enjoy the simplicity and beauty of the Green Mountains. That is when the trouble began, as Stimson brought in an out-of-state contractor and crew rather than hire local folks to fix her house. Then, in an impulsive moment, she bought the local country store with hopes of turning it into a high-volume gourmet shop. Though nothing really went as planned, the beauty of Vermont and its changing seasons gave Stimson solace. "There is no more naturally beautiful place I have ever been," she writes, "and I have been to a bunch of them." The author dramatizes the age-old conundrum of newcomers versus old-timers and the difficulties of fitting in--even if acceptance, in this case, only meant that the locals would not boycott the store after she moved the bread rack from the back of the store to the front, near the registers. Meanwhile, cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, goats and skunks traipsed through their idyllic setting, biting the minister and generally running amok. In a humorous, self-deprecating style, the author examines a variety of questions about her new life: In Vermont, what constitutes an emergency? When can you call 911? With aplomb, Stimson describes her rural Vermont setting, the changing seasons and what drew her to the state. A section of recipes--including "Lovely Fluffy Quiche" and "John's Grandmother's Roszke Cookies"--and the obituaries of three pets round out the volume. A quick, light book to keep around as a pick-me-up.

Kirkus Reviews