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refreshing brew soon after the cans were dumped into the horse trough to cool.

A couple of days after their arrival, the Christmas-in-July event took place. This was the opening of the two or three boxes of Yankee, hand-me-down clothing they brought each year. There were always pants, shirts, sweaters, caps, and, if you were very lucky, a discarded baseball jersey from a Fort Edward team. No one went away empty-handed; there was always something for everyone, and we proudly wore the new duds.

About two days before it was time for the four of them to leave, John would take a shovel and go back to the fields to dig up three or four little spruce trees. He would hide them in the lower bowels of the trunk of the car. In the same way that it was illegal to bring the beer cans