This is an entry in my Vermont 251 Club series. The main post — which lists all 252 places in Vermont — is here. As I visit each one and write about it, the name will become a live link. Middlebury and Montpelier are both available for free, but most of the series will be paywalled, so if you think you would enjoy reading more of these, consider subscribing. Here’s a coupon.
To understand Glover, Vermont, is to understand a community whose relationship to reality is…bifurcated. Radically so.
To the point of feeling downright surreal.
Choosing to live in rural Vermont is choosing a high-effort lifestyle. For at least the winter six months of the year, the weather requires ongoing mental calculus. Snow, ice, and the constant threat of sliding off a curvy two-lane road — that’s just Tuesday. You either do the hard physical labor of digging yourself out, or you arrange to have it done. There is no skipping it. And there is no shortcut.
You have to pay attention to ungameable realities. To live here is to stay in touch with the material world — with gravity, thermodynamics, traction, weight, and time. You have to know at least a little about how things actually work.
Which makes the cultural split all the stranger.
There are two places in Glover that are famous enough to draw road-trippers from all over the state — and far beyond. One is the home of the Bread and Puppet Theater: a commune that glorifies Communism through oversized papier-mâché puppets, radical propaganda, and a worldview so saturated in death-worship and aesthetic decay that it nearly pushed me into temporary, well, if not theism — temporary belief in demons.1
The other could not be more different.
Where Bread and Puppet is heavy-handed and hollow, this place is light, odd, and unexpectedly profound. Where Bread and Puppet numbs the senses with dogma and despair, this place delights them with objects — small ones, forgotten ones, the things we handle every day without ever really seeing.
Instead of preaching a twisted utopian fantasy for which hundreds of millions have paid with their blood, it quietly celebrates the real.
The physical. The useful and true.
It honors the beauty of the mundane; the humble objects that form the infrastructure of ordinary life.
The things that let us move freely and live richly in the West, even when we forget to notice, and to be grateful.
I’m talking, of course, about The Museum of Everyday Life.
The Museum of Everyday Life bills itself as a “revolutionary museum experiment,” and for once, the word revolutionary isn’t a euphemism for political propaganda.
It’s a slow-motion act of savoring, noticing, appreciating — and ultimately of gratitude.
The Museum is a handmade, low-budget shrine to the pencil, the toothbrush2, the safety pin. This is not a museum of artifacts-as-commodities, but of objects as companions: the items that pass through our hands without ceremony, yet shape our days in innumerable, quiet ways.
There’s philosophy here, yes — an entire “philosophy department,” in fact — but it’s grounded in joy, not jargon.
My favorite part of the permanent collection is the pencil exhibit, for reasons that will surprise no one.3 Pencils are how little kids used to learn to write; and in some places, still do. They were my first art form.
The first time I managed to recreate three-dimensional life on a two-dimensional page in a way that wasn’t just recognizable, but also felt true — not just close, but honest — I was using a pencil. That moment rewired something in me, which sounds dramatic. Because it is, and in the best way.
Later, when I gave myself permission to start buying real, professional-grade pencils, it became one of the first deliberate acts of self-love I’d ever made. Real self-love — not the TikTok kind.
The kind that says: this matters to me, so I matter too. I matter enough to buy professional pencils even though they cost $2 each.
Here are pictures from the pencil exhibit, including an intriguing archway piece and a dragon gobbling a pencil-created woman.
The permanent collection includes toothbrushes, too, as the yard sculpture suggests.
I love this one the most — a jail toothbrush that was mailed from a facility high enough in security that the inmates are not allowed real toothbrushes.
Someone who was brushing her teeth when she noticed the smoke that indicated her house was on fire donated the toothbrush to the museum’s permanent collection, too.
Much more, including exhibits on matches, whistles, knots, bathing, stains, and about fifty additional photos, behind the paywall. Coupon here.
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