To The Editor:
As a voracious reader of magazines, newspapers and viewer of all television commercials, I have recently noticed interesting ads for, of all things, “gutter cleaners.” I could not imagine why anyone would be placing an advertisement for something that was my job on the dairy farm many years ago. You see, my aging brain somehow did not recognize that gutters are also something that appear on houses where rain water is directed down in an orderly fashion rather than just running wild off the edges of the roof.
As a young “gutter cleaner,” it was my job to take the hoe, walk behind the cows in their stanchions where they did their duty and make sure the manure and urine stayed in the gutter and moved down the path to where it was dumped into the basement receptacle, usually a manure spreader, where it would be carried out to the fields to be spread and enrich our corn and hay crops. That was the job of the “gutter cleaner” when I was growing up in Waitsfield at the Round Barn Farm on North Road in the 1940s and 1950s.
Yes, I guess we learn something new every day and it is never too late to do so! What a surprise to learn that gutters have a far different usage today than they did back in the cow barn of the 1940s! It always bothered me that this was the only job my dad seemed to think I was capable of doing. My brother, two years younger, was already being groomed as the successive farmer by learning how much grain to give each cow. When I complained, I was told very nicely that I was a girl and that gutter cleaning was women’s work!
Perhaps it is little wonder that I did not spend much time after that in the barn.
Mary Alice Bisbee
Montpelier VT
