Also by Sherry Horton:

The poignant story of a marriage as well as a gallant journey into loss, Witness Chair is both a beautifully written personal memoir and a compassionate guidebook to the art of living in the face of suffering and death. In his last years, artist Christopher Horton, the author's husband, worked on the design of sixteen "chair" maquettes in preparation for an art installation to commemorate the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. In reflecting on her long marriage and the difficult months before her husband's death from leukemia, author Sherry Horton draws on the unsettling yet powerful significance of the various chairs, seeing her life and the death of her husband through the concepts of accusation, displacement, rumor, captivity, and heaven. Leah Leatherbee describes Witness Chair as a "quietly searing account of the unspoken," and Bernie Siegel soberly remarks: "In love’s service and the process of life and healing, only the wounded soldier can serve. Read Sherry's words and understand why."

From I Want to Talk: Growing Up in Lunenburg, Vermont 1920-1940

To do the laundry they brought in this ladder thing that folded up. When you wanted to use it, two ends would come down to form a counter about waist high. There was a place for two wash tubs, with the wringer between them. You washed the clothes, put them through the wringer and rinsed them, then put them back through to dry them as much as possible in another pan. We hung the laundry outdoors unless it was bitter cold. There was a clothesline in front of the barn between the barn and the road. My father had to shovel a path to the barn anyway. In the winter the pathways had probably a foot and a half rise of snow on either side. Hated it! I hated the snow, though I enjoyed sliding when it was good. When the teams went past the house down to the village with cans of milk for the creamery or with loads of wood, those thread runners left very slick, two-or-three-inch wide marks in the road, so it was good sliding. We lived on a little hill, and on good days I could slide almost all the way to school. Go belly bump. You had to listen to be sure a car wasn’t coming down back of your house to hit you at that turn. My father’d say, “Listen!” And of course, the cars made more noise than they do now. I never had any close calls.

They had two years of high school in the village at that time, and a high school teacher, and so the high school boys and girls would slide. They had a traverse sled my father might have made with two smaller sleds hitched onto a long board making a flat top where you sat. The front sled had a pin that would pivot, so you could steer it a little bit. Lunenburg being on a series of hills, it was fun to slide down one hill and go up the next a little ways and slide back down. There wasn’t much traffic around. Somehow or other, when the teacher was riding on the sled, it tipped over and she broke her leg, so I was never allowed to go to the village. Even when Rheba was staying with us to go to high school they wouldn’t let me go. Rheba could go sliding but she was five years older.