A #Vermont thread: Lloyd tells me 3 ways to get to Morrisville. "Which," he adds, "you don't want to do that." He was born in "Morris," but now he lives in Jeffersonville, "Jeff." Lost his job at a sawmill--"ash, mostly," he says, "dries your hands, cracks 'em to the bone"...
...& then his job as a dishwasher, & the his home. Now he's sick. This fly-specked apt is where the county put him. There were farmers in his line, but not Lloyd. "I weren't," he says. "Don't speak French, neither." The two twinned in his mind, farming & French, Vermont-French.
"There's more Vermont-French than you realize," he says. He never learned. Not computers, either, he says. Not the old way or the new. Now old is new: "corporate," by which means farms bought up, "megabucks," 5, 6, a dozen family farms under one hand...
The computers, tho! Have I seen how the kids use them? "They block you out," Lloyd says. "You say, 'Son!' Or, 'Daughter!' They block you out." I ask: You have kids, Lloyd? A son, a daughter. "She's gonna be 18. And"--he pauses--"2nd or 3rd of August, our son'll be 14."
"We don't have the kids anymore," Lloyd says. "Lost 'em to the state." I don't ask. Lloyd says. "Some people made comments about us. But others what was worse than us got their kids back." One couple got their kid back, & then--"state worker never bothered to ask." ...
Ask what, I say. "They said the kid was sweet," says Lloyd. "Sweet?" Asleep, he means to say. He's lost a lot of teeth. Some words come crooked now. The sweet kid: "The state worker never bothered to just peek on him," says Lloyd. "And the kid was dead."
Lloyd would like to know: Do my kids learn the computers? My daughter does. Good, good. "& teach her the roads," he advises. "Take a map. Say, 'We're here. Can you find a way?'" Set her to finding 3 ways. Anywhere to Anywhere. Norwich to Burlington. Morris to Jeff...
"Tell her to see if she can find different roads to get you from here to there," he says. The idea seems urgent to him. He sees his kids once a year. "Most roads leads you from here to there. Not all roads. But most roads take you wherever you want to go." ...
Lloyd consider. "Most of the time," he says. "Right?" 
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