Vrest Orton, original proprietor of The Vermont Country Store, and Robert Frost, poet laureate, were familiar with each other, it seems, according to his grandsons, Gardner, Cabot, and Eliot, who operate the store and catalog company today, along with their father Lyman Orton.
This post’s featured photo, of the bunny taking advantage of a maple syrup collection site to catch a sweet treat, is from the pages of a spring catalog by the company that keeps iconic products alive for their fans, even when popularity wanes.
In our area, at least, daffodils and hyacinths don’t appear at the time of maple syrup processing, but artistic license makes for a cute photo.
Robert Frost was famous in the mid-twentieth-century for his poetry centered upon the natural world. He celebrates impending spring in the following:
To the Thawing Wind
by Robert Frost
Come with rain O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow bank stream;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But what’er you do tonight
Bathe my window make it flow
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sitcks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.
The Penny Mason Post 