That's my Dinah there in that picture over the counter, her face all shy and looking out from under those big blonde bangs, getting her likeness carved in butter.  Rutland State Fair, 1997.  Imagine - the cover of the Addison County Agri-Times!  All bundled up in her parka in that refrigerated booth where they display the butter busts.  Posing right there next to Miss Lamb & Wool, see that?  Ever since she was a little girl in 4-H and bringing home her first blue ribbon for the calf she’d bottle-fed when it lost its mother, Dinah set her sights on becoming Dairy Princess someday.  Jim was so proud, I thought he'd bust a button, as we watched her take her winning walk down the Milky Way that day.

We'd wanted a big family but after Dinah, I lost the next four in early pregnancy. We never had any tests run, just figured this was how it was going to be; we'd about given up on having any more when Grace came along. A full twelve years after her big sister.

The summer that was taken, the summer Dinah was Dairy princess, I had just turned 36 and my three year old, Grace, had finally stopped nursing.  My doctor thought it'd be a good time to get a baseline mammogram, what with having lost my mom from breast cancer and all. Up 'til then there'd been the pregnancies, my yearly checkups, the usual, but my breasts had never given me any problem. I had a queer sense of reclaiming myself as I sat in the waiting room fingering the pilled polyester couch cushion, ready to herald in this next phase in the care and maintenance of my body. Doc Pierce told me not to wear any deodorant that day, in preparation for squashing my breasts into that unnatural position, into that machine  - the thank you for all their years of service.

Doc Pierce had delivered me. He was so far out in the country, even his reading material was behind the times.  The magazines he kept on hand would probably be collectible if they weren't so dog-eared.  I glanced across the coffee table strewn with People and Newsweek.  He still had issues dating back to the 80's. Life on the farm never gave me much time to indulge in reading so sometimes my annual check-ups were the only opportunity.  (Oh, sure, I was at the doctors more often than that in a year but always it was some emergency with the girls, a broken arm, Grace's asthma  -  no time to relax.) My favorite subject? The Princess of Wales.  Inevitably she graced the cover of one copy or another. That time I picked up an issue that was only a year or so out of date  - it was about a retrospective of her gowns that were coming up for charity auction.

The first time I ever saw her picture was when I was getting my blood drawn for my marriage license 16 years before.

"There there, relax, this won’t be bad," Doc Pierce had reassured me, patting my hands.  Me embarrassed that he'd noticed my finger nails, chewed down to the quick - a nervous habit I was not able to break until well into my twenties.

It had been harder than I realized getting ready for my wedding without my mother there.  It made it a peculiarly melancholy time for me - when all I'd wanted to be was happy.  We'd kept it simple, just our families out on Pine Island where I'd loved to play as a child - the rug of pine needles under my feet.  (It was on the edge of the woods  -  not a real island, just a hillock where a stream divided around it but I'd always called it Pine Island.)

Our vows were simple. We'd chosen to say them to each other directly rather than repeat after the minister. But somehow I'd managed to flub James' name anyway.

I take thee, James Thomas, to be my husband, promising to be unto thee a loving and faithful wife.

Thomas being his last name, instead of the Christian middle name Edward that we'd been instructed to use.  We brought Dinah home the next June, the same month Prince William was born.  But by the time Harry came along, I'd already had my first miscarriage and was on the cusp of a second.  I concealed my grief from Jim best I could; I knew he was suffering too.  We just put up a strong front for each other.  A united front.  I've been lucky in this regard.  Such a steady, good man.  A man who doesn't touch drink.  That's saying something here in Vermont where we both grew up  - the state with the highest rate of underage drinking in the country.

The day the '97 fair closed, we finished bringing all the livestock home, then went out for pie and ice cream to celebrate Dinah's coronation right here, at the Shoreham Road House Diner.  You can see it's a Don't complain about farmers with your mouth full kind of place.  It's where my Dad hung out most lunch times having a smoke and talking about farm prices with the other retirees.

"Can I get a hot fudge sundae, Momma, can I?"  Grace jumped up and down tugging my sleeve.

"You know you can't finish one," Dinah scolded her.

"Here, pumpkin, hop up on Granddad's knee.  Tell you what.  What say you and me order one together and share?  How'd that be?"

She squealed her approval and scrambled into his lap. Dad was definitely slowing down lately. Just the other day he'd asked me to take him into town for a card for Priss's new baby. While I went next door to the A&P for groceries, he spent over an hour in the pharmacy, finally coming back with a three and a half dollar card the size of a road map practically and blank inside.  It was of a big cow with black velvet spots, not only expensive (for my Dad) but inappropriate for a new baby, I thought.

I joked, "What are you going to do with that, Dad?  Write 'got milk?' in it?"

But instead of laughing, he'd looked bewildered, hurt even.  I'd been noticing he seemed more confused some days.  It broke my heart.  Sy Mullens, champion of the tractor pull eight years running when I was a teen, best darn birdshot in the county, too ("Hell! The whole state!" I'd once heard someone say, right here at the Road House.) To realize he was wearing out  -  who could ever have imagined such a thing?

Driving home up Buffalo Hill with him and the big card that day, I'd been filled with foreboding.  I had a sudden premonition - a flash of something like comprehension, if you will, about what it is when a horse breaks a leg and has to be put down.  Wondered (for the first time in my life ever I think), Does it always have to be?

When we got home from the Road House, Dad's lame lab loped out to greet us and he reached down to pat the dog's head.  Dinah's prize winning heifer, Duchess, was not in the front paddock where we'd left her earlier. She didn't come when we called either; Jim and I would have to walk the line and check the fences. Our horses were famous for getting out at least once or twice a year  -  we'd find them running up on the Fisk Road more often than not.  But it was unusual to have a cow go missing.

"Hey, Dad, come on.  Wanna walk the line with us?"

Normally you couldn't keep him from walking it.  He loved any excuse to look over the land, often staying out in the gloaming, coming back with a firefly cupped in his hands for Grace's delight.

"Naw, you go on.  I'll see to things here." He and the dog headed for the barn. Since he'd given up drinking so many years back, a series of bird dogs had replaced the bottle as his constant companion. Still, it was surprising to find Dad stalling on putting this one down - the dog was so obviously in pain.  Not only from that limp but, also, its eye had been injured, probably from a twig snapping across it during a hunt, and had gotten infected.  As a farmer and a self sufficient man, this was something he'd always taken in stride, the necessity of dealing with sick or injured animals in the quickest way, a single shot to the head. (Farm life gave me nightmares as a child.  I even worried that Dad might put one of us down if we got into something bad enough.)

Instead he'd gone so far as to take this old dog into Middlebury for bee sting therapy, to help its arthritis, and had even put money out recently to remove that bulging eye.  Dad seemed to be doing everything in his power to extend this dog's life.

I sent Dinah into the house with Grace.  "Oh, Mom, can't I come too?"  I shot her a silencing look; she knew I didn't feel comfortable leaving the baby home alone with Dad anymore.

We found the heifer the next road over. She'd gotten through a weak spot in the fence and had slipped down an embankment along the road.  The land is greasy here; she'd somehow entangled her leg  -  It was wrapped around a sapling, all bone and sinew and blood, and not only that; she had a huge gouge in her hindquarters. I didn't want to contemplate how much time she'd been lying there or that terrible wildness in her eyes, like a trapped animal - the kind you hear about chewing off their own foot to free themselves.

A look at the road confirmed my husband's suspicions  -  Tire marks and a bit of broken headlight smeared with Duchess's blood and fur. "Son of a Bitch!"  he roared. "Damn kids, out on a bender!"

"Calm down, honey.  Whoever it was must have thought they'd hit a deer."

"Yeah, like that makes it okay?  Leaving an animal out here like this to suffer?"

"That’s not what I meant."

Jim ran back to the truck, grabbing his rifle off the rack, knowing this would be quicker and therefore, more humane than calling a vet.

Dinah was so distraught about it, we were up most of the night.  So I had other things on my mind that Sunday morning, as I stood brewing a cup of tea for my daughter and the news came over the radio that the Princess had been killed.  I paused to take it in and a terrible wave of sadness crashed over me, her loss co-mingled with my own concerns about Dinah, about Dad. My heart went out to her two young boys, How would they get through this?

Later that fall, a Montpelier boy's death had shaken the whole state: the eleventh teenager to be killed in a drunk driving incident that year. A star athlete. Trebor and Dinah had collected pollywogs together as kids.  He'd moved away by junior high and we'd lost track of him but I still had a tender spot for the sweet boy who'd banged in and out of my back door all those summers before. The investigation into his death turned up that another carload of drunken teens had been involved.  It had been front page news for weeks, taking up where all the Diana stories left off, and heightening my anxieties as the mother of a teen.

I'd see the droves of teenagers during "free" period, all baggy clothed, filing out of the high school and down the street to the Dairy Queen.  They terrified me.  There'd been some tension between Dinah and me lately with her begging to borrow the car.  I was petrified to let her go, afraid of my loss of control over her, afraid she'd end up in a car with a drunken boyfriend or worse, drink and drive herself.  I grew up here; I couldn't pretend that the isolation and boredom didn't exist. And that a driver's license could give instant freedom and friends.  I couldn't kid myself that riding around drinking was not embedded in the culture - I'd done it myself, beer blasts being a way to flaunt the drinking age of 21.  Even if Dinah was responsible (and I wanted so much to believe she would be) she could still end up in a head-on collision with another car full of partied-out kids, I worried. I did my best to see she kept busy, driving her all the way to Middlebury for dance lessons, plus 4-H, and her weekend job at Colton Lace & Cleaning.  I just prayed she'd get through these years and find something more beneficial to do with her time.  But I knew no one was immune.

It never really hit me that the Princess was gone until months later, when I was back at Doc Pierce's for my annual exam.  These visits had always been my touchstone with Diana.  This time the old magazines were gone, her glowing face nowhere to be found.  To think that there had come a day when she would not be there at the Doctor's with me.  I realized, then, what a comfort she had been all those years, distracting me from the anxiety that checkups inevitably brought on.

Then we got the call. Old Garland Hoag asking, "You missing some horses Jim?"  Two were loose up on Decker Flats.  You just know it's going to be bad if it's up there, especially at night; there's been so many accidents over the years - with that blind spot, usually involving drunk drivers.  Jim and Dinah jumped in the truck.  I followed with Grace in the Honda – rushing with heart in mouth.

Jim and Dinah had the seemingly impossible task of rounding up the large, and by now, probably spooked and disoriented animals. I was skittish around horses myself, having taken one too many falls as a kid. But I could flag down traffic. I put the flashers on and left Grace buckled into her car-seat, running ahead to alert on-coming cars to the situation.

They found the colt right away, snorting and sweating up a lather, misbehaving.  But the mare was nowhere in sight. More than an hour ticked past.  Jim was hoarse with calling.  Dinah was sobbing; she walked back to me, leading the colt, exhausted, collapsed against my wool jacket.

"Listen," I said, "She's had it.  You two walk the colt home and Dinah, you get in bed. I'll keep a look out 'til you get back, Jim."

"What about Grace?"

"She'll be fine.  She's asleep in her car-seat."

I went back to the car to check on her, decided to get in and drive up the road a ways.  Maybe the mare had gone further than we'd thought.  Suddenly, from the back seat, Grace cried out, "Look Momma! The Princess!  Go back - go back, Momma!"

"What princess?  Where?"

"Back there."

"Who  -  your sister?" (Ever since Dinah had been Dairy Princess, Grace sometimes called her that.)

"No, Momma, the Princess of the People."

I don't know what I thought she'd seen but something in me made me throw the car in reverse and back up as fast as I could. I may have half expected to find Dinah still looking for the horse, though I knew she was with Jim and half way home by now.

I couldn't see anything but Grace was insistent.

"There, Momma, right there," she said pointing.

I got out of the car and looked over the embankment.  A shock ran through me when I saw the tail-lights.  Though you couldn't have seen it from the road, a car was nose down in the underbrush.  A young man was slumped unconscious in the driver's seat, still strapped in but alive  -  a seventeen-year-old boy who would otherwise not have been found in time. The mare was standing, unhurt, nearby.  But there was no one else on the road and no woman was ever found at the crash site.

At first my husband was quick to blame the crash entirely on the kid; he was underage and his blood alcohol level had been above the limit.  But I refused to let him, never sure that our horse hadn't had a part in things, though the boy himself never recalled anything to indicate that.

That night I learned I couldn't keep the people I love swaddled in safety but I could take action  -  do something for the kids in this community, instead of blaming them. Give them somewheres to go and something to do during the long, hard winters.  A youth center kind of thing. Dad didn't make it through the winter; I toyed with the idea of taking the family on a trip to England with the money.  We've never been out of New England and part of me wanted to see the Princess's ancestral home, her resting place. Instead, I'm putting the money he left towards the Youth Center. Combined with the fund-raising Dinah's started at school and the people who are donating their time, the Center should be ready next fall.  My hope is that we'll be honoring the Princess's memory more profoundly in this way than just another visit from a common soul could.

Since then, there've been similar reports, people's claims of the Princess appearing and helping them out in times of need.  Tabloid TV has picked it up; we've heard the stories on Hard Copy, even Unsolved Mysteries.  It's something we've never talked about outside our home  -  not so much because we feared the media circus or even the reaction of our neighbors.  More out of a Yankee impulse for privacy, I guess.

I don't know what my baby saw that night – my saving Grace.  It's just a mystery I hug close to my heart.  A wraith or a fetch, a guardian angel, or just a tree caught in the moonlight, one thing's for sure  -  someone is alive today because of it.  The idea that it really was The Princess is compelling; we all know she would have used her goodness to save more lives if she’d lived. And now those connective links I've always felt to her feel REAL.  What I'm saying is this: she was just a mortal woman, after all, like you and me, but that sometimes it takes something extraordinary to transform us.

Author Bio

And as far as animals go, I'm (((still))) the animal crackers in your soup.