Vermont versus New Hampshire

In Vermont deer are required to have shots. In Vermont people keep flocks of spayed sheep to decorate their lawns. In Vermont when inchling trout are released into streams, a state law requires that they be preboned and stuffed with wild rice delicately flavored with garlic and thyme. Vermont has decorator barns; Calvin Klein will sign your woodshed for $250,000. In Vermont you can buy boots precaked with odorless manure. Taylor Rental outside Burlington hires Yankees out for parties, each guaranteed to know three hundred amusing rural anecdotes, all of them ending, “You can’t get there from here.” They chew nylon straw, they repeat “Ayuh” over and over again, and they cackle hideously until you pay them off. In 1998 TransUniversal Corporation acquired Vermont, reorganized it as Yankeeworld, and moved it to Arizona on flatbed tractors.

In New Hampshire the state supper is beans and franks, and every recipe begins with salt pork, Campbell’s cream of mushroom, and Miracle Whip. In New Hampshire breakfast and supper are both at five o’clock. In New Hampshire a brunch is something not to walk into when you are hunting coon. In New Hampshire convenience stores sell Fluff, Wonder Bread, Moxie, and shoes with blue canvas tops. In Vermont they have the forty-hour work week; in New Hampshire the forty-hour work weekend is standard. In New Hampshire people work a hundred hours a week cutting wood, setting up the yard sale, and misdirecting flatlanders; the rest of the time they make Vermont maple syrup and Vermont cheese.


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