September in Vermont was always so unearthly that even the shadow -- on Merry’s life when Jeanette went home to Winooski, and the Farmer's son, Ronnie, was discharged from Fort Benning and returned to the dairy farm -- was lifted from her shoulders when she looked at the wildly-colored groves of trees that adorned green hillsides that rolled across the valley.

In the early years of American participation in World War II, Vermont was one of the first states to recruit women to work on farms. Merry Joliat was from a family of men who worked as stone cutters or sculptors in the granite quarries in Barre and women who worked in the textile mills along the Winooski River. But when the opportunity to work on a dairy farm arose, in 1942, she joined what would soon officially become the Women's Land Army.

The farm family had provided a home environment for the Land Girls, who worked long days milking, sterilizing equipment, feeding the cows, cleaning the stalls. Before he enlisted, Ronnie was an efficient manager with dreams of new equipment and a girlfriend in town. His marriage proposal to Merry was unexpected. She was, he explained, well trained in the workings of the dairy and would be an asset. Her rejection and desire to go home to Barre were not met with friendly dismissal. Instead, with no car, Jeanette gone, and access to the family phone curtailed, Merry was subject to Ronnie’s continued advances.

It was late September, precisely when Pete Lafitte should have returned from the Italian Front. But he had not yet appeared. Without making what she was doing too obvious, in the bunkroom, Merry organized what she needed to take home. A neighboring farmer was regularly visiting Winooski to court Jeanette. But farmers stuck together in this part of the country, and she wasn't sure whether or not to ask for a ride to Winooski, where she had Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins who would take her home to Barre.

In Barre, her Mother was alone until her Father returned from visiting a granite quarry in Hingham Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Ronnie had taken to patrolling the outskirts of the dairy in his new tractor. It was now parked directly across the path that led to nearby farm houses.
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