The Trespassing Cucumber

Among the stories of Sutton is one about a married couple who quarreled and quarreled until finally they decided to live apart. So they divided the house and garden and the wife lived in one end of the house and the husband in the other.

Each planted his half of the garden and all was well. But in course of time a cucumber vine, planted in one half of the garden, grew and grew until it wandered across the dividing line and bore a big fat cucumber on the wrong side. Another squabble was now provoked, this time over who owned the cucumber, and the two went at it again.

(This story was told by an elderly lady on a folklore program at a Ladies Aid meeting. At the close of the story, another lady who knew the story spoke up to say that the husband and wife, dead many years, were still separated, bodily at least, being buried in cemeteries miles apart.)

-- Mrs. Delmore Aldrich, Windsor

Source: Vermont History, edited by Leon W. Dean, President, Green Mountain Folklore Society, Vol. XXIV, No. 4, October 1956