Photo Pest: Billings Farm & Museum

Saturday, August 24, 2024

Billings Farm & Museum

Although Thom and I had visited the "other" Woodstock in 2021, we missed the Billings Farm & Museum. Magda & Joe are members, so I thought it would be mostly for kids. Not so. I particularly enjoyed the museum, which uses painted barn quilts as an exterior decorative motif.

"At Sea" by Anna Pauly (2024)

Petting zoos appeal to adults, too, something every parent knows. Me, not so much.

The well-tramped sunflower maze blazed with bright color against pristine blue skies. In Ocean Vuong's remarkable novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, one character loves another just because of the way he looks at the looming members of the daisy family which have grown as high as 30 feet!

An organic farmer whose grandmother picked cotton as a young girl for five years and whose grandfather grew tobacco explained that tobacco is a natural pesticide. "That's why smokers don't get attacked as much by mosquitoes." Don't tell Altria.

A series of dioramas illustrated the old, hard way of life in Vermont. I complain about having to crack open ice trays. Imagine having to cut massive blocks from frozen lakes and transporting them via horse and wagon to cities and towns in winter.

This workshop reminded me a lot of my father's two-car garage in El Paso, with pegboard substituting for the windows.

We'd already toured a sugar house but the Billings Museum had a more extensive collection of syrup buckets and steel taps.

Early home decoration. reading instruction and even picnics--called nooners for working men--recall simpler times.

Apparently, animals used treadmills a century earlier than most people (aside from prisoners, by whom they were employed as a form of slave labor). Goats, sheep and large dogs helped churn butter