Elizabeth Gauffreau’s latest novel, The Weight of Snow and Regret, is a poignant fictionalized account of the last poor farm in Vermont, a place where displaced people were sent, ostensibly to work, but mostly just to live because they were considered too ill for an unsupervised life, but not ill enough to be confined in a state institution. The novel is also about two women, so different from each other and yet so similar in their struggles to live wholly.

Gauffreau expertly teases out the stories of these two women, Claire and Hazel. She begins the novel with the mystery of Claire, a woman found ill-dressed for the Vermont winter, silent and close to starvation. Hazel manages the Sheldon Poor Farm where Claire is brought, and she manages to bring Claire back to life. Unlike the reader, she never learns the entirety of Claire’s story.

Gauffreau tells each woman’s story in her own words so eventually we learn what motivated Claire, a woman in her 40s with a husband and a teenage daughter, to leave her home in Louisiana and make an almost disastrous journey to Vermont.

We also learn about Hazel and her complicated relationship with her husband Paul and with the residents of the Sheldon Poor Farm, all the while with the closing of the farm hanging over their heads. Early in the novel, Gauffreau gives us a glimpse of Hazel’s relationship with Paul.

“What happened?” Paul said. “Where did she come from? I thought we weren’t taking new inmates.”

Hazel winced. After twenty years, would he never learn? “Residents, Paul.”

There’s tension between them, a tension borne not just out of hard, backbreaking, run-off-your-feet work, but, as we eventually learn, of deeper, irreversible experiences that would have destroyed any other couple.

Gauffreau tells Hazel’s story by going back and forth through time, each chapter revealing a bit more about this complicated woman, each chapter adding to a deeper understanding of this remarkable woman. She reminded me so much of my aunt Mildred who would have been Hazel’s peer: both women sculpted by the Great Depression, so stoic and hardworking, and beset by more tragedy than any one person should ever bear.

Gauffreau writes with a sensitivity that can only be gained through close and sympathetic observation. While she had to have undertaken extensive research to make this novel possible, the flow of her writing seems effortless.

In a pause between songs, a mournful cry drifted over the water, hung suspended before it cried again. Hazel lifted her head from Paul’s shoulder.

“What was that?”

“Loon. You never heard one before?”

“No, what’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. That’s how mates find each other in the dark.”

The Weight of Snow and Regret is written like a mystery novel, a detail here and a detail there to give depth and shape to the lives at the Sheldon Poor Farm. You keep reading because you want to know. You want to know why and how Claire wound up at the farm and then why she left. You want to know how on earth did Hazel and Paul meet and then marry and stay together. You want to know about each of the residents, why they are at the farm, and what will happen to them when the farm is closed.

And now, as with all good novels, it gets personal for me.

Often while engrossed in The Weight of Snow and Neglect, I thought of my father. Around the time I was born and through my teenage years, my father alternated between living at home with us and being confined at the Utica State Hospital (originally called the New York State Lunatic Asylum at Utica). Eventually he became too “well” for the institution, but not well enough to live unsupervised. My mother divorced him with I turned 18 but by then I think he was already living in a “halfway house.”

I never visited my father there. Although he wasn’t expected to work, he did have to share a home with several strangers. I don’t know what it was like for him because I never talked to him about it. But it probably would be too much to hope that he lived in a place like the Sheldon Poor Farm with Hazel to look after him. She would have seen his humanity and treated him with tender respect. She would have had him feel valued.

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Thank you for reading. I hope this review encourages you to pick up a copy of Elizabeth Gauffreau’s novel The Weight of Snow and Regret. It is available in various formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. I also highly recommend the audio version of this novel available at Audible and Libro.

You can also find Elizabeth and links to her other books at https://lizgauffreau.com.

I leave you with a photo of a couple of furry friends in upstate New York.