After a hard day splitting wood or loading hay for delivery to horse farms, Paul Aube would like to head home. But he doesn't have one.

Instead, the 48-year-old laborer gets a ride from the Ferrisburgh. Vt., farm where he works to neighboring Vergennes, where they drop him off at the John W. Graham Shelter to spend another night in the men's bunk room.

Aube, whose education ended in 10th grade, makes $50 a day for his farm labor - not enough to afford an apartment.

In the summer, he stays in a beat-up old camper-trailer on the farm. It doesn't have a heater. Aube says he's saving up for one. But in each of the last three Novembers, "when it gets really cold" he has given up the trailer for the homeless shelter.

"I'm a little down about it because I'm in a place like this where you can't really be by yourself," he said in an interview. But, "It's a roof over my head and it keeps me out of the cold."

Homelessness is not just an urban problem.

While more well-known in big cities, it reaches into America's small towns and rural areas, too.

In New Hampshire, where homeless memorial day was observed in Concord, Nashua and Manchester Thursday, about 3,000 people are now homeless, many of them children. At least 11 homeless people died in New Hampshire this year.

In Vermont, which marked homelessness awareness week with events this week, 4,000 have been homeless at some point in the last year - about a quarter of them children.

With the cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Vermont affordable only to those making $32,000 a year or more, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, $50-a-day workers like Aube are often forced to do without.

At the Graham Shelter, his predicament isn't unusual, according to director Elizabeth Ready.

Many of those staying at the 18-bed shelter are working - at supermarkets, department stores, a soap factory - and others are in transit, fleeing abusive spouses or suffering from mental health problems.

"The most heartbreaking for me are the people with mental health problems who come in for a few days and then go back out on the street," Ready said.

Jeffrey and Virginia, a couple staying at the shelter, fled a communal living situation in Burlington that had dissolved in drugs and violence. Both have struggled with alcohol addiction. Their last names are being withheld to protect their privacy.

Jeffrey, 50, was beat up after he tried to stop housemates from coming on to Virginia, 26. "It was really a yucky environment," Virginia said.

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