ash

My father’s French-Canadian grandmother, a Plantier, inexplicably married a man of British (possibly Irish) descent up in Hartland, Vermont. Must have broken her mother’s heart. Mixed marriages, you know. She married a man named Burt Ash, who may have been the son of one Eugene Ash, a Canadian, who settled around Rutland, Vermont. When my great-grandmother got pregnant with my grandfather, Mr. Burt Ash fled his responsibilities, his town, and his marriage, leaving my great-grandmother alone to raise her son, alone and very angry. The first thing she did was reject the Anglo son of a bitch by changing his name to the French, Dufresne. Old Burt’s long gone, of course, but if any of the Windsor County Ashes read this, drop me a line and tell me who I am.