The 5.5 million-circulation Reader’s Digest soon ran an excerpt. Norton, which released the hardcover through its Countryman Press in 2013. Stimson sold her manuscript to prestigious New York publisher W.W. Her memoir, “Mud Season,” came with a subtitle almost as long as winter: “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.” That’s when the self-professed “flatlander” (“Real Vermonters are calm and sensible - they would have never bought the store,” Stimson now says) began to write a book.
(“You moved the bread from where it used to be,” one longtimer sniffed.) And less than five years later, facing bankruptcy after sales plummeted 70 percent, sold what was left of the business for half its original purchase price. They soon bought a two-century-old general store.
Louis, population 318,172, to the Green Mountain town of Dorset, population 2,031. If only someone had told Stimson about mud season.īy 2003, she and her husband and three children had relocated from the GatewayĬity of St. Then fall: “There are always boutique farmers at roadside stands selling cheese, bread, bunches of beets, and hot apple cider wildflowers displayed in old jelly jars countless fairs exhibiting everything from antiques to merino sheep.” Then summer: “We aimed for supper beside a stream and our morning coffee in the woods.” Of a romantic sleigh ride pretty much sold us on the eventual move right then.”Ī Northeast winter, she envisioned, would melt into spring: “The fields are filled withĭandelions - the happy yellow of childhood.” “We watched it and imagined living on a farm in New England,” she recalls. Vermonter Ellen Stimson was living in the Midwest almost two decades ago when her husband surprised her one December night with a bottle of port and the equally spirited black-and-white film “Christmas in Connecticut.”
Author Ellen Stimson holds one of her chickens outside her Dorset home.
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