GUILFORD — “Me and my twin sister Marolyn loved to ice skate on the pond out in back of our house,” shares Maddie Cutting Meyer, a native of Guilford.
She's wearing her trademark smile as she shares the story.
“We'd invite all the neighborhood girls over to enjoy the ice and we'd take turns shoveling it off,” she remembered. “We were out back anytime we got the chance.”
“Of course, all of us kids had farming chores to do first. We fed the cows hay and cleaned out the gutters; my job was to strain the milk. We just went and had fun after that, and we'd skate until we got cold or it got dark. Mother would give us the devil if we came in late.”
Everyday snapshots of life in Guilford's past like Meyer's will be portrayed in a play on Thanksgiving weekend as a part of Guilford's 250th birthday celebration.
Written by Guilford resident poet Verandah Porche, the Broad Brook Anthology, will be based on interviews Porche has been collecting from town elders over a number of years and published as Kitchen Talks.
One of the members of the Guilford 250th Committee, Don McLean, explained that Porche put these conversations into a format to share with the public for the celebration.
“The narratives are read by five of the area's finest actors, and a guest reader from New York. They include memories of one-room schools, the Hurricane of 1938, rural electrification, courtship, hardship, and youthful mischief,” he said. “It weaves together recollections of 28 current and former Guilford residents, aged 69 to 91.”
Historic photographs and portraits of each elder, taken by Jeff Woodward, also of Guilford, will be projected onto the wall of the room as the actors read.
Michael Kennedy is directing the production, which includes a cast of six, including Porche.
Actor/readers include Christopher Coutant, Shoshana Rihn, and Robin Wolf, all of Brattleboro and known as three of the region's finest stage actors. All three have appeared in many Guilford performances.
Coutant and Rihn are seen in the film The Stuff of Dreams about the Monteverdi Players' production of The Tempest on Guilford's former Sweet Pond.
Arthur Pettee of Guilford rounds out the local cast. Pettee and Rihn might be remembered for their portrayal of Royall and Mary Tyler in the Vermont Bicentennial play True as Steel by Christina Gibbons and Don McLean, which was performed in 1991 in Brattleboro and Guilford.
Completing the cast is Brooklyn, N.Y., theater director, playwright, and actor Ain Gordon, who is associated with Vermont Performance Lab.
A cast of four - Dave Snyder, Jerry Stockman, Michael Hanish, and Julian McBrowne - will contribute to the sound, lighting, video, and audio.
MacLean wrote some incidental music, that will be performed by Alison Hale, Karen Bressett, and Peggy Spencer.
“I designed it to frame the text, provide occasional interludes as a space between sections of narrative and, in a few places, to underscore the words or to provide musical commentary on the narrative,” McLean said.
The stars of the show will no doubt be the stories of Guilford's yesteryears from people like Shirley Searles Squires.
Squires, a townie in Brattleboro, attended the St. Michael's elementary school until she moved to Guilford when she was 10. She is still living in the house in which she grew up.
“I was used to 20 or so kids in each class, and this one-room schoolhouse on Tater Lane (it is no longer there) was probably no more than 20 kids altogether,” she said.
“Tucky Houghton still tells people that he was always the smartest kid in his class until I came along,” Squires said. “Of course, it was just the two of us in our grade, so the competition was pretty thin.”
When Squires was little, the neighbors across the way were some of her only playmates.
“We used to do a lot of sliding in the wintertime. We slid on a toboggan next to the brook. It was fun sliding down, but it surely was a long way back up that big hill,” she remembered.
“In the summer, we swam in the brook. Other than that, we really didn't leave the town to do much else until we were teenagers,” Squires said. “Then we'd fill a car and all go square dancing together.”
While some of the stories of Guilford's elders reach back to the 1920s, there is plenty of history to be recorded from more recent times.
Squires' son, Ron, the first openly gay member of the Vermont Legislature, served two years in the House of Representatives, representing Guilford, Vernon, and part of Brattleboro from 1991 until his death in 1993.
Squires grew quiet as she explained what happened.
“Ronnie didn't know he was dying of AIDS until three or four months before he left us,” she said. “He had worked on Bill Clinton's campaign. Near the end, we were all in the hospital room and the telephone rang; the person who picked it up thought it was a joke, and said to me, “President Clinton is calling.”
“We all laughed because we couldn't believe that would be true, but I picked up the telephone and sure enough, it was the president, calling to thank Ron for his service to him.”
The play also contains the voices of Guilford residents Arnold Clark, Margery Evans, Helen Marynuk, Alberta Allen, Peg Hunter, Wilma Higgins, Norm Coleman, Al Franklin, Tucky and Pat Houghton, Bea Garland, Ken and Pat Lynde, Nancy Ragle, Bernie and Bernice LaRock, Addie Minott, Peg Jaqueth, Margaret Borkowski, and John Kristensen.