Rick Nichols: In a Vermont village, reliability and change

WEST GLOVER, Vt. - You can expect certain things here each summer - that Phil Brown down at the rabbitry will insist on undercharging you for rabbit rather than make change from a $20 bill (which compels you to bring him a gift bottle of wine, which he thanks you for before telling you he doesn't drink the stuff much anymore), and that the bags of tender salad greens at Lake Parker Country Store will be stored as inconspicuously as possible on the bottom shelf of the glass-doored cooler, and, if you go a bit late to the BBQ chicken dinner in the Congregational church basement, the 5-year-old cleanup girl will station herself intently at the table's edge as you finish, waiting to snatch up the plastic salt and pepper shakers.

This village is in the northeastern corner of Vermont, cottages sprinkled around a modest lake, dairy farms hanging in the balance, the woods traced with dirt roads well-suited to heavy tractors and logging vehicles.

And if Jay Peak, the ski resort to the northwest, and Newport, the city straddling the Canadian border 25 minutes north, can seem poised on occasion for overhaul or makeover, the town of Glover (of which West Glover is a part) seems more about continuity, and for returning summer people, soothing immutability.

This is, of course, a mirage. Wishful thinking. As August settled in, first the raspberries and then the blackberries ripened, easy picking up the hill from the old Borland farm (where the dairy herd was sold off last year).

You could still fetch fresh-laid eggs from the hens' roosts at Lilygate Farm (but there was no grass-fed beef for sale in the barn's freezer).

And at the mouth of Stevens Road across from the store, the wages of progress would soon be the subject of prickly debate. A stout, hand-lettered sign pounded into the ground was the first shot: "No Parking," it said.

Parking is not among the problems that leap to mind as you round the curve that sweeps into West Glover's center - a cluster of fewer than a dozen houses, the rescue squad's garage, a steepled church, Merle Young's blue dairy barn - and an idiosyncratic country store where you're advised that, yes, they have no bread crumbs: "But over there we've got panko."