I Want to Talk

Shortly after Sylvia Worthley turned eighty-two, she summoned her daughter Sherry Horton to her apartment. With her spine straight and hands folded in her lap, Worthley announced, “I want to get down what it was like growing up in Lunenburg,Vermont. Can you help me?” Over the next several weeks, Worthley spent dozens of hours talking about her childhood while Horton taped the conversations and took careful notes. Remembering events of her childhood fondly, Worthley became tearful only when describing aloud, for the first time, her mother’s death in 1933 when Worthley was just twelve. Horton listened eagerly to everything her mother said about the three generations of women who came before her, how they lived on hilly, remote family farms during the tumultuous decades of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. I Want to Talk, the result of compiling these taped conversations and notes, tells the story of a family and a village in northeastern Vermont during the years between 1920 and 1940. This portrait of rural life in New England is enriched with numerous photographs provided both by the family and by local groups focused on the history of Lunenburg, Vermont.