This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
Vermont can feel like a very small place. On average, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon are cut by half in the Green Mountain State. And for anyone with a people-intensive job, those degrees of separation shrink even further.
After 35 years in Vermont and almost 25 as a journalist, I am no longer surprised when I’m out reporting and encounter a friend of a friend, or when someone says, “Did you write that article about so-and-so a few years ago? She was my daughter’s favorite camp counselor.”
So it was far from shocking when I followed the scent of cinnamon into a back room at Hudak Farm in Swanton and met the self-proclaimed “Hudak Doughnut Ho,” who quickly informed me that he was friends with several Seven Days colleagues. (I found out later that he’d even officiated the 2010 wedding of deputy publisher Cathy Resmer and her wife.)
Chalk that up to the standard small-Vermont world. But about 20 minutes later, things got more interesting.
I had watched the doughnut machine and its operator work their magic to produce the best cider doughnuts I’ve ever tasted. (Sorry, you’ll have to wait for their seasonal reappearance next September.) In the farm store, I started chatting with customers. After one couple offered some good doughnut commentary, I scribbled down their names.
Deep in the cobwebs of memory, something clicked. I asked them tentatively if they’d had a preemie baby in the Burlington neonatal intensive care unit 28 years ago.
Lynda Ulrich and Chuck Verderber confirmed that we had shared the intense experience of hovering over our tiny, fragile newborns in incubators — for weeks in our case, months in theirs. We talked briefly, and thankfully, about how our kids are now full-grown, thriving adults.
That alone would have made for sweet serendipity, but a few minutes later, a young woman working at the farmstand piped up, “Excuse me, but were you all talking about being in the NICU in late summer/early fall 1997?”
It turned out that she had also been born preemie about a week after we left the hospital. Lynda and Chuck were still there with their daughter and instantly remembered Eliana Pacheco and her family.
Pacheco is an analyst for National Life Group, but she’s been working for Hudak Farm since 2015 and still helps out on busy summer and fall weekends. “I love the cider doughnuts,” she texted me a couple of weeks after the end of Hudak’s doughnut season. “I have a bag of them in my freezer for emergencies.”
My brain must be too full of names, or I might have thought of doing that.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Smallest World”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!