To The Editor:
As someone who grew up in the Mad River Valley, way back when, the 1940s and 50s, I was really shocked to read that the covered bridge is once again going through a new historic update. I believe it was in the 1970s when I took my complaints to the Vermont historic bridges organization and was told that the bridge must be completely redesigned, as it was, to meet with current standards. That is when the whole roof line was recreated on one side to cover the walkers' area. It has never looked right ever since! It now looks like a mall storefront instead of its original character. I painted it as it once stood in the 1940s and 50s to at least keep that character preserved. In my childhood, it looked very different. As I mourned the early death of my mother in 1946, I often hung over that walking area, looking north and downriver to my home where my mother lay dying on the North Road, Round Barn Farm, and wished I could go home again.
Instead, I was housed at what was the Moriarty residence, next to Riford Joslin's grist mill and my grandfather Walter Moriarty's sawmill yard out behind. Oh how things have changed! (If you would like a photo of the old bridge, I could probably send you a copy of my painting.)
Also, I would like to send my kudos to Walter Carpenter's letter this week about the real need to adopt a single-payer/universal health care plan, not only for Vermont, but also at the federal level, if we are ever going to even out some of the atrocious inequities in our private for-profit health system in this country.
And, oh yes, I almost forgot, I have moved from Montpelier to Rochester, the Park House, right on Route 100, where the old-fashioned flavor of Waitsfield, as I once knew it, still exists.
MaryAlice Bisbee
Rochester
