Growing old chestnuts

Bill Bryson repeats the cliche about New England farms. Some stretches are flat, fertile and have few rocks, such as the Pioneer Valley, along the Connecticut River, above. And the weather is more severe in the Midwest than in New England.

“If you were going to be farmer, you could hardly choose a worse place than New England. (Well, the middle of Lake Erie maybe, but you know what I mean.) The soil is rocky, the terrain steep, and the weather so bad that people take actual pride in it.’’

-- From Bill Bryson’s humorous book A Walk in the Woods (1998) about hiking the Appalachian Trail