Catie Clark

Families tend to create their own traditions for celebrating the Thanksgiving holidays. The tradition in my family when I was growing up was Thanksgiving dinner “at the farm” in Plymouth, Vt., with Eugene Coolidge.
The farm was just that — an old dairy farm, several decades into retirement when I was in grade school. My godparents bought the farm from Eugene Coolidge, a retired dairy farmer who was a cousin of Calvin Coolidge. When my godparents moved to Colorado for work, my family got the keys.
Thus started a time when we spent many of our cold-season weekends at the farm, hunting or skiing or playing around in the snow. The farm was always under snow, in keeping with the three seasons when we visited: almost winter, winter, and still winter. Vermont is very much like Minnesota in that respect. We hardly ever visited the farm in the summer, otherwise known as the season of poor sledding.
Eugene Coolidge had an arrangement with my godparents where he could continue to use the property for hunting. Like many farmers of his generation, he relied on bagging the legal limit of five bucks and one bear to fill his freezer for the winter. His hunting on the property meant he was around all the time in November. He taught every kid in my family how to shoot and then how to hunt whitetail deer. In March, when the ice started to break up on the local ponds, Coolidge would take the kids in my family up to the maple grove, uphill from the old upper cow meadow, where his father had built a sugar house. He would collect enough maple sap to fill the evaporator to make a batch of syrup, start up the fire, and then fling cups of boiling syrup out onto the snow where we kids would scramble to pick it up because it turned into instant maple sugar candy.
Because his wife was dead and his kids had moved away to jobs in Massachusetts and New York, my parents included Coolidge in our Thanksgiving dinners. Eugene Coolidge at dinner was always a treat because he had wonderful stories, told with classic Vermont reticence and humor.
For example, the road past the farmhouse was just a dirt track that was once well traveled as the main road from Ludlow to Rutland. Indeed, as Coolidge related, some of the Green Mountain Boys took that road in 1775 on their way to rendezvous with Ethan Allen in Castleton, Vt., where the American militia force assembled on their way to capture Fort Ticonderoga. As he told the tale, one could almost hear the trudge of leather-soled shoes as the green-coated Green Mountain Boys marched past the farmhouse, next to the stream that ran down to the Black River.
Eugene Coolidge liked kids and liked teasing them, too. My brother, who was a chatterbox, used to pepper Mr. Coolidge with nonstop questions and sometimes, Coolidge would oblige with one of those classic Vermont wise guy answers that I’m now convinced he saved up just to needle my obstreperous brother.
On returning early from making maple syrup one afternoon, my brother asked over dinner why we had done so.
“Because I was sapped,” Coolidge replied.
On another occasion around the dinner table, my brother asked if Coolidge had lived in Plymouth his whole life.
“Not yet,” came the predictable response.
Most of the times that we hosted Mr. Coolidge for dinner were at Thanksgiving. The talk always veered to the subject of hunting because Thanksgiving weekend was always the last day of deer season in Vermont.
In the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, I remember my brother asking, “Mr. Coolidge, did you bag all of your deer yet for this year?”
“Bags are not effective. I use a rifle.”
I can remember the year of the best-ever Eugene Coolidge retort. It was 1971. I was in sixth grade. My brother was in high school. We drove up to the farm the night before and collectively spent the morning prepping for dinner. Mr. Coolidge arrived and we sat down to eat. Of course, my brother had to pepper the old guy with a million questions.
“Mr. Coolidge, did you ever have any kids?”
“Nope.” Out popped the answer instantly, though we all could tell from the look on Coolidge’s face that he was wasn’t done with his answer. You could almost see the thoughts sorting themselves out in Coolidge’s head as he meticulously picked his next words. Then the lips parted as he delivered his next great gem of wisdom.
“Had a wife who had a couple, though.”