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Beginning in 2018 "Ruth's Neighborhood" entries were also posted on Ruth's FACEBOOK page where her entries (usually weekly, on Sunday mornings) usually lead to lively conversations.

This Page: January - March 2025

PIANO SONGS

February 2, 2025

Happy Groundhog Day! And belated happy National Eat Ice Cream For Breakfast Day yesterday; I celebrated with New Hampshire’s Walpole Creamery coffee ice cream. Penny, my sister, never waited for an official day but enjoyed ice-cream breakfasts year round; her favorite flavor was Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.

While describing my fictional Quarry Island Ice Cream Park in fictional Long Harbor, I’ve had great fun choosing songs for the band to be playing in the Victorian bandstand, from the first song Puddles hears there, “A Bicycle Built for Two,” in A BORN MANIAC to the songs she hears in OFF SHORE, such as “Little Annie Rooney.”

I took piano lessons from the time my hands were big enough to reach an octave until I was in eighth grade; life then got too busy. So when I chose the songs for the bandstand I was remembering the piano songs in sheet music and music books for  lighthearted piano lessons (as opposed to “Liebestraum,” etc.) and in the old songbooks that were piled inside the bench that went with (accompanied?) my mother’s piano.

One day last year when Wanda and I were in her car doing errands and chatting, somehow goats were mentioned. I burst into a piano-lesson song! I could only remember the first and last verses; when I got home I Googled and found:

Bill Grogan’s goat
Was feeling fine,
Ate three red shirts
From off the line.

Bill took a stick
Gave him a whack
And tied him to
The railroad track.

The whistle blew,
The train grew nigh;
Bill Grogan’s goat
Was doomed to die.

He gave three moans
Of mortal pain,
Coughed up those shirts
And flagged the train!

How I would laugh as I played and sang that last verse!

On January 20th I was reading the Sandwich Board posts and came to Allan DiBiase’s daily “Thoreau Comes to Sandwich” quotation from Thoreau JOURNAL quotation, this one dated January 20, 1852:

“I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper in a week, for now I take the weekly TRIBUNE, and for a few days past, it seems to me, I have not dwelt in Concord; the sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. To read of things distant and sounding betrays us into slighting these which are then apparently near and small. We look abroad for our mind and spirit’s daily nutriment, and what’s this dull town to meThe quotation continued but I stopped reading because I’d begun humming, “What’s this dull town to me?” And then I exclaimed, “Robin Adair!” and I was remembering a piano-bench songbook, its binding frayed from years of use. Playing an imaginary piano I sang the first verse of the song I hadn’t thought of in eons:

What’s this dull town to me?
Robin’s not near.
What was’t I wish”d to see?
What wish’d to hear?
Where’s all the joy and mirth,
Made this town a heaven on earth?
Oh! They’re all fled with thee,
Robin Adair.

Then I Googled to read about it. Wikipedia told me that “The song was mentioned by Jane Austen in her 1815 novel EMMA . . . Lady Caroline Keppel wrote the song bearing her husband’s name during the 1750s as a rebuke to her family for what she perceived as their snobbery regarding her handsome and accomplished lover.”

The 1750s! Jane Austen mentioned it in 1815, Thoreau quoted it in 1852, and here I am singing it on Groundhog Day in 2025!

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

TITLES

January 26, 2025

The other day after I heard the term “mutual aid” on TV, I then heard myself thanking Don once again for the titles he gave to many of my novels.

As I’ve written about here, when I started a novel I gave it a “working title.” OF KINDNESS AND OF LOVE, the working title for the novel that became my first published book, was a quotation from Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”:

 . . . But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
But my editor at Bobbs-Merrill didn’t like this title and suggested SEASONS OF LOVE. Eek, no! At that stage of my life I was fond of quotations for titles so Don and I returned to my anthology from Bennington’s Language and Literature class, THE MAJOR POETS: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.

And Don suggested three words from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green . . .

The editor liked THE LILTING HOUSE.

My working title for my next novel was THE BYPASS. I wasn’t fond of it but it was workable; when I finished the novel and Don and I discussed the title he suggested THE COST OF LIVING.

For the next novel I worked with AMPUTATION for the title and was content with it, but when Harvey, my Putman’s editor, saw it he pointed out that it was gruesome. Not a title that would make browsers reach for a copy. Don and I conferred. This was a novel about divorce and he suggested ONE MINUS ONE.

THE SILENT GENERATION was my working title for the next novel. Don and I and Harvey agreed that it was too dull-sounding but we were stymied. Harvey even read the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Three Little Maids from School Are We” in search of a quotation! There was an obvious title but did it sound too young, would this very adult book get put in the “Young Adult” category? Finally we three decided to forge ahead with THE CHEERLEADER.

My working titles for my next novels, WIFE AND MOTHER and AUNT PLEASANTINE, remained the final titles. The working title for the next was CROFT and I liked it but Atheneum’s publicity department said it didn’t “sing.” So Don and I looked up Scottish songs and chose the title of a lament, THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST.

For the next novel’s working title I decided to use a phrase that Don had once remarked would make a good title, A LOVELY TIME WAS HAD BY ALL. Atheneum agreed.

The sequels in The Snowy Series seemed to name themselves and my working titles remained the final titles.

But there was one more stand-alone novel, inspired by my correspondence with a fan who over the years became a friend, Glenn Person.

He also inspired SNOWY: In a letter replying to my letter’s mention of a get-together with high-school friends, Glenn made a comment about enjoying news about “the Gang.” Despite all the requests for a sequel, I’d been terrified of writing one because they’re notoriously difficult to do without disappointing readers. Suddenly, reading his comment, I realized I’d reached a vantage point from which I dared to start writing SNOWY.

 My working title for the last stand-alone was HITTING THE WALL. Before the second draft I knew I wanted to find a better title. Don suggested MUTUAL AID.

Glenn died during the AIDS epidemic. MUTUAL AID is dedicated to him, In Memoriam.

Thank you, Don.

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

VELVEETA, etc.

January 19, 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about melted cheese. In my post last week there was the Foothills café’s invitation to Raclette Night and I savored your raclette comments. In my binge-listening to Maisie Dobbs novels I recently finished the audiobook of A SUNLIT WEAPON and in it Maisie’s stepmother says to her, “I’ve made you a round of cheese on toast.”
Cheese on toast!  Immediately I was remembering Suffolk, England, our tiny galley kitchen in our Brandon Hall apartment, and a stove.  As I wrote in a July 2022 post, “I’ve written here before about my fondness for the small stove Don and I had in our apartment in England, with its little broiler pan under a burner. I could make cheese toasts so easily!”

I continued, “Years later I read S. Blyth Stirling’s very funny NAKED SCOTLAND: AN AMERICAN INSIDER BARES ALL; in it she wrote about “Things Scottish People Like,” with instructions about making “Cheese on Toast/Roasted Cheese/Toasted Cheese: Place thinly sliced cheddar on slices of bread and put it under the grill [broiler] until the cheese is bubbly and the bread is just slightly browned on the edges. It sounds so simple, but it’s the perfect comfort food for a chilly climate. It’s delicious on its own, but I highly recommend kicking it up a notch with Branston pickle (a pickled chutney). Leave it to the inventive Scots to get something so simple, so right!”

And now from the sublime to the—Velveeta. In the January/February issue of SMITHSONIAN magazine, a table-of-contents item got my attention: “Origins: Velveeta.” I flipped pages and reached:
“American Culture: How Emil Frey whipped up a smooth dairy sensation. By David Levine.” He writes, “The year was 1916, and Jacob Weisl, owner of the Monroe Cheese Company of Monroe, New York, had a problem. Some of the wheels of Swiss cheese made in his factory in Pennsylvania inevitably broke or were misshapen, leaving a plethora of bits and blocks of cheese that Weisl was desperate to salvage. He had this waste shipped back to Monroe, where the solution was concocted by one of his cheesemakers, a caseiculture genius named Emil Frey. On his home stove in Monroe, Frey spent two years tinkering. His breakthrough came in 1918, when he devised a new way to mix the cheese pieces with whey, the leftover liquid from milk curds, while adding an ingenious emulsifier to blend the fats and water . . . The result was a cheese that, when melted, became a smooth, velvety sauce. Frey dubbed it Velveeta—and it became an instant hit.”

In 1927 Kraft Foods took over and “soon changed the Velveeta recipe . . . crucially replacing real cheese, which has only three or four ingredients, with the paragraph of chemical elements that still graces the package today.

“In the 1930s and 40s, Kraft began marketing Velveeta successfully, if rather dubiously, as a health food and diet aid, and its low price and convenience—beloved by kids, shelf-stable, melts like a dream—charmed America’s homemakers throughout the suburban ’60s and beyond.”

And now I’ve returned in memory to that little stove’s broiler pan, melting cheddar.

  © 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

SANDWICH BOARD GREETS 2025

January 12, 2025

Here are some posts I’ve enjoyed as the Sandwich Board begins the New Year:

January 1.
Plymouth Square Dance. Lift your spirits at the Barn on the Pemi tomorrow night. What better way to start off 2025? All details are on the attached flyer. Please share with your friends, neighbors, and any family members who still haven’t gone home! Experience a rousing good time in Plymouth with professional caller David Millstone, fiddler Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki, and pianist Sue Hunt!
[Ah, that brings back memories of high school, the only time I square-danced. As I wrote in THE CHEERLEADER, “ . . . today basketball was over for the gym classes and square dancing had begun. (Snowy) hated gym-class dancing. At a signal from the coach, the boys charged across the gym toward the girls, who were chattering lightheartedly to cover their anxiety . . . ” Bev had forgotten that there would be square dancing and had worn a straight skirt that “caused her great difficulties during dancing. It was wise to wear a full skirt . . . ”]

January 3.
Thoreau Comes to Sandwich, posted by Allan DiBiase. January 3, 1853, in Thoreau’s JOURNAL: “The air is thick and darkened with falling snow, and the woods are being draped with it in white wreaths. This is winter. They are putting on their white greatcoats.” Photo: January 3, 2000: Hazy snowfall in the woods.

January 3.
Anyone been ice skating? It looks like glass but is it safe? Would love any information, guesses, and experienced skater opinions. Have you been out? Looks like cold and clear for the next few days.

January 4.
Ice Conditions. Always proceed with caution and check thickness as conditions change. This is what I’ve gathered and hope it’s helpful but don’t sue me if you fall in! Also learned according to the Old Farmers Almanac the ice should be over       30 inches thick to safely hold a T-Rex! (See chart below.) Good advice not to go alone and to bring ice picks. [In the chart, “Squam Lake: Glassy and getting safer/thicker every cold day.” When Wanda and I drove past Squam on January 6th in ten-degree weather there was still open water in the bay.]

January 7.
The Foothills [the café in the village center]: Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Hello, Sandwich! Wowza. Feels like minus 2. But the Foothills is warming up with a couple of events to draw you out of your onesie wearable blanket. Or you can feel free to dine in your onesie wearable blanket. We’ve got no dress code. This Thursday at 6—Trivia with Ashley and Amelia. Reserve your team table now because we’re filling up. On Saturday, January 18th, we will be having another Raclette Night. Come and join us for French après ski whether you actually ski or not. Makes no difference to us. You just really need to like melted cheese. Every day is warm at The Foothills so come on over for soup and our incredible fireplace—on TV.

January 8.
Cold Feathered Friends. This Downy Woodpecker clung to the side of my window as if saying “Let me in, it’s freezing out!” It’s so cold that the heated birdbaths are freezing over! Holy Moly!
Photos: The Downy Woodpecker, birdfeeder in background, looking with interest into the window.

January 8.
Banjo gathering every other Thursday. Yes, we’re still gathering at the Sandwich town hall every other Thursday to play our banjos on our knees. 6:30 to 8. Simple easy no pressure—not a lesson, just a get-together to learn from each other and try some cool stuff.

[And now I’m humming “Oh! Susanna” and in my imagination I’m there with my five-string banjo, plucking.]

  © 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

WORDS

January 5, 2025

                 When I saw the news about “polarization,” the Merriam-Webster 2024 “Word of the Year,” I thought about my own word of 2024. When the TV is on I’ve been listening throughout most of the year for a word that seems to have disappeared.
                 The word is “very.”
                 I listened and listened and listened—and all I heard was “super.”
                 The year was nearly over when on December 22nd on a Food Network baking competition a judge declared, “Super delicious” but followed it with, “and very well executed.”
                 After lamenting for months the death of “very,” I cheered and wished I could still do a cartwheel.
                 Also on the Food Network in December, some old-fashioned words were fondly remembered on “The Pioneer Woman” when Ree Drummond was cooking from an old recipe and said, “I love these old recipe terms—‘heaping,’ ‘scant,’ ‘pinch.’” Ah, yes! The words suddenly seemed beautiful to me and I was back in my mother’s pantry and my grandmother’s, reading food-stained cookbooks.
                 From these beautiful words my mind swerved to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “for a while after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be whistling or humming.” He thought that “Ode to a Nightingale” was unbearably beautiful and never could read it without tears in his eyes.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
     My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
     One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot.
     But being too happy in thine happiness—
         That thou, light winged Dryad of the trees,
               In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
     Singest of summer in full-throated ease . . .

And here’s the verse that mentions Ruth, which of course in my youth I memorized:
Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!
     No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
     In ancient days by emperor and clown;
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
     Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
          She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
               The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
     Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn . . .

From these beautiful words my mind swerved to nonsense words. At one time I tried memorizing Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” I learned that nonsense was harder than beautiful, at least for me.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
     And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
     The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the JubJub bird and shun
     The frumious Bandersnatch!” . . .

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
     Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
     He chortled in his joy . . .

My joy about hearing “very” has settled down and now I’m listening again, hoping to hear the word again.

     © 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

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