Author Archive for Susan Leader
Vermont native and noted potter Susan Leader grew up on Popplewood Farm in Andover. At age 17, she was inspired to take up the potter's wheel by "a charismatic potter" from the Society of Vermont Craftsman. She spent 18 months apprenticing at pottery villages throughout Japan. She returned to Popplewood Farm, where she and her husband, fiddle player John Specker, raised their two daughters.
Left in Andover: Some heroes don’t wear capes
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC When I was little, my family made frequent trips to Bennington from Andover to visit our aunts. We developed various rituals coming into town including who could catch sight first of the Bennington Battle Monument. Then, yelling “keppel” (Yiddish for head), we ducked our heads in unison as […]
Left in Andover: The mouth of the Williams River
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC During my childhood in the 1950s, I almost never went to the doctor. My mother nursed us through earaches, measles, mumps and chicken pox with hot water bottles and rest on the living room couch. She dismissed fluoride as rat poison. tetanus shots were resorted to only for […]
Left in Andover: A woodland Rosh Hashanah
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC On Nov. 6, 1950, shortly after closing on Popplewood Farm in Andover, Mom wrote Grandma: “We were in Rutland on Sunday night with the express purpose of meeting the Jewish community. We went to the Jewish Community Center and Modern Orthodox Synagogue housed together in one beautiful building. […]
Left in Andover: Treasures within the thrift shops
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC The boxes of hand-me-downs mailed to us every fall by Mom’s cousins in Cincinnati were a high point of my young life growing up in Andover. We kids had never met these cousins in person but, like clockwork, one of them seemed to have always just outgrown my […]
Left in Andover: Peru Fair pottery sales & parades
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Ever since 1984, when I got serious about earning a living as a potter, I have looked forward to my annual Peru Fair “seconds sale” as a chance to clear away the old, to make space for the new — my pottery New Year’s celebration of sorts. In […]
Left in Andover: Ancient cellar holes a window to the past and future
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC A hundred feet off my front doorstep lies the original cellar hole to the “West Place, so-called,” as my property is referred to on the deed. Lucy Jones West bought her eponymous homestead in 1866, a year after her husband Henry West was mustered out of the Union […]
Left in Andover: Drawing strength from the roots
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC When we moved into a cabin on my family’s land in Andover in 1979, one of the first things my partner John Specker did was plant trees. Following in the footsteps of his great grandfather at his farm in the Catskills, John dug up evergreen seedlings in early […]
Left in Andover: A wider world, a wider vision
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC When I sent my tender firstborn off to kindergarten in Chester in 1989 I fretted she would eat white sugar, discover Twinkies and Barbies, celebrate Christmas, take the DARE program literally and go steady by third grade. Although my daughter did most of the above, I discovered it […]
Left in Andover: Treasures in the stones
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC According to The Local History of Andover, Vt, written by H.H. Gutterson and published in 1886, the earliest settlers of this area “could have had any part of the Connecticut valley they came through, at the same price they paid for their farms here; but the early settlers […]
Left in Andover: Local newspapers, social trust
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Mrs. Frieda Bergman is spending some time at the Herbert Leader home” in Andover. The deep winter time frame for my maternal grandmother’s visit was possible because she had taken a job teaching in a nearby one room school. “Seven little friends,” continued correspondent Estelle Bentley’s March 1952 […]
Left in Andover: Tackling adversity and bridging differences
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Teaching is my job,” wrote Scott Nearing from Forest Farm, his remote Winhall homestead, in 1944. “I have been sure of that ever since I gave my first sociology courses at Temple University, Philadelphia, back in 1903. Teaching has three essential aspects: 1) to arouse interest, 2) to […]
Left in Andover: A step back to go forward in women’s health care
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Brattleboro Hospital was the place to deliver when I had my two babies in the mid-1980s. It had been early to adopt woman-centric policies, offering my women friends and me wide latitude in our birth plans. But Springfield was a shorter drive from my home in Andover. I […]
Left in Andover: Home in the hills of Vermont
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Due to the pandemic, scores of non-resident property owners have worked remotely from area ski and vacation homes. Many will choose to remain as full-time residents. And even more will continue to find their way here as air travel becomes increasingly problematic. I believe future leaders of our […]
Left in Andover: The gift in the rituals of death
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Four women, members of the local chevra kadisha burial society, arrive to perform the ancient rite of tahara, or washing the body of the deceased, upon my mother. As I cross the dimly lit funeral home lobby on my way out to grab a soy latte, they reach […]
Left in Andover: Waters in the heart
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC A hundred feet into the woods off my front porch is a shallow well hand dug in the 1950s by a hermit who lived in the cabin which is now my pottery studio. We dubbed it Hammy’s Well after our daughter’s hamster met its demise there many years […]
Left in Andover: Vegetarians in meat-filled world
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC As a hyper-sensitive vegetarian child in the 1950s I avoided close-up contact with the chickens my family kept for eggs. Obscured underneath their pretty feathers, my X-ray vision detected dead poultry as displayed at the supermarket. My little brother, on the other hand, enjoyed picking them up and […]
Left in Andover: Between Chester and home
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC As a child in the 1950s, I developed my home town identity attending Peaseville School in Andover. The other kids and families who lived scattered among the surrounding hills were my world. Their names, faces and home places are forever etched in my brain like points on a […]
Left in Andover: From the pages of Northampton
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC My early morning marches along the dike overlooking the Connecticut River floodplain were a mortification for me on the coldest winter days. Not because I had to walk, but because the exertion caused my face to turn beet red. The unforgiving gauntlet of female eyes at morning assembly […]
Left in Andover: Recovering lost family history
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC Most of what I collect at thrift shops and recycling centers is strictly utilitarian. But last year while helping my daughter recycle in Winhall, I snapped up an ornate cast iron picture frame. My husband has two similar frames displaying portraits of his crusty German forbears. My heart […]
Left in Andover: The comforts of comfrey
By Susan Leader ©2020 Telegraph Publishing LLC My family knows better than to get up hope when I decide to bake cookies. By the time I grate a few carrots, grind up some oats and skip the dairy, gluten, fat and sweetener, the finished result is more likely to resemble a veggie burger than dessert. […]
