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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

 

FAMILY RECIPES

March 23, 2025

           Recently I wrote here about a project that many of us are doing, the attempt to weed out and organize accumulations of papers, clippings, etc. I was tackling fat file folders of stuff I’d saved for and about writing.
           Last week, however, I went through a loose-leaf notebook whose cover was once white but now looks as if it had been deep-fat-fried a yellowed brown. Red lettering still shows: RECIPES.
           This is my mother’s collection of recipes. Ernie was a secretary and it began very neatly as she copied recipes onto the notebook’s pages and taped in those she’d cut out of magazines and newspapers. But Penny and I and our father used the notebook and contributed recipes we’d copied or clipped and—you can imagine what the notebook now looks like. Stained, faded, clippings crammed in and falling out. The notebook had been well-used, well-loved.
           Reading it was like attending a reunion of the relatives, friends, and neighbors whose names Ernie had noted beside their recipes.
           My Grandmother Ruth’s recipes were the most familiar. In my early-married years I had transferred some to recipe cards in my recipe box, such as her famous Sour Milk Blueberry Muffins, the best blueberry muffins in the whole wide world. I’ve written here before about those muffins and given the recipe; I can’t resist giving it again:

           Into 1 c. sour milk (1 c. sweet milk, add 2 T. vinegar, let stand 15 mnutes), put:
1 t. baking power
1 t. salt
½ t. baking soda
Stir well and add:
2 c. flour
½ c. sugar
1 c. blueberries
2 T. melted butter
Bake 25 minutes in 400 oven.
1 dozen

           Next in the notebook was Grandmother Ruth’s Congo Bars. They had seemed so exotic; the recipe’s ingredients included a can of coconut! After reading that recipe I stopped abruptly at her Apple Sauce Cake recipe. I had forgotten all about this cake and it had been such a simple favorite. She made applesauce and gave many jars to Ernie.

1 c. sugar
½ c. shortening
1 egg
1 c. raisins
½ t. clove
½ t. cinnamon
½ t. nutmeg
salt
Dissolve 1 t. soda in a little warm water. Stir this into 1 cup sour apple sauce, letting it foam up. Pour over above ingredients. Add 1 ¾ cups flour. Bake 45 minutes in a 350 oven.

           Amongst other family recipes there was Marie’s Sausage Casserole, which had come from Ernie’s brother’s (Uncle Lou’s) second wife whom I much admired; Marie was a journalist in Florida and in the early 1950s had been hailed as the first woman to go into some part of the Everglades. As with other recipes of the era, it featured canned goods. It seems awfully funny now but at the time it had seemed quite clever:

“Put 1 can of spaghetti in baking dish. Pour over 1 can tomato soup. Cover with bread crumbs or grated cheese. Stuff cored apples with sausage (cover top and ¼ down) and place on spaghetti mixture. Bake in medium oven until apples are done and sausage is brown.”

When I finished going through the notebook I went back and read the Apple Sauce Cake recipe again, remembering my grandmother’s and my mother’s kitchens and pantries.

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

WIDER EYELIDS

March 16, 2025

Springtime is toying with us in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Here are some Sandwich Board posts:

February 19. “Thoreau Comes to Sandwich”; Allan DiBiase.
     February 29, 1852 in Thoreau’s JOURNAL: “The sky appears broader now than it did. The day has opened its eyelids wider. The lengthening of the day, commenced a good while ago, is a kind of forerunner of the spring.” Photo by Allan: Wide view across a snow-covered field to woods and mountains.

March 8. Local Vocals Vernal Equinox Sing. So far we have 5 voices for the Wentworth Library “Spring-celebration” on March 22. If you think you might want to join us, we have fun, easy, well-known songs with two guitars to help string you along. Contact me for the rehearsal date and song list. Thanks.

March 8. Beede Falls—Thin Ice. It’s a beautiful day to visit Beede Falls, but though the ice is inviting, I recommend that you don’t venture out onto it. The running water has made it thin in places and you probably don’t want to be the one to discover where. Enjoy and be safe! Photo: Waterfall dropping between snowbanks into pool, partly splashing, mostly ice.
[Ah, Beede Falls, which Don and I visited often. In the Mount Israel hike in 50 MORE HIKES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE my father described it: “A path leads to the Bearcamp River—here still a brook—and Beede Falls. A wide, misty curtain of water slides down a rounded ledge into a pool surrounded by dark hemlocks.”]

March 10. Last Call for Pi(e)! Pickup at Bearcamp Center FRIDAY at 4 p.m.
   Chicken and Leek Pie: tender chicken, caramelized leeks, thyme, white wine, cream.
   Savory Butternut Pie: Butternut, Pecorino cheese, pickled red onion, garlic.
   Guinness Pie: beef brisket, mushrooms, rosemary, Guiness, cheddar crust.
Each pie is a large individual serving of about 5” and comes with a salad with a lemon vinaigrette and a Whoopie Pie for dessert.
[Hmm, which one would I choose? The Butternut pie. Although savory, it would remind me of the sweet squash pie my mother made with the Butternut squashes my father grew in the garden. He didn’t grow pumpkins, so pumpkin-pie fillings came out of a can.]

March 10. Reminder: St. Patrick’s Music at the Benz [the Sandwich community center]. Monday, March 17, the Sandwich Jam with be playing Irish Music at the Benz Center 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. All welcome to join us there for snacks, BYOB, and of course the wearing of the green. This is a free event; donations for the Benz Center gratefully accepted.

March 11. Sandwich Notch Road. Does anyone have a guess as to when the Sandwich Notch Road will be open for vehicle traffic this spring? Asking for some friends who want to drive in there to reach some climbing spots. [As I’ve written about here, this is a little dirt road through a farming neighborhood thriving in 1850. It’s part of 50 MORE’s Mount Israel hike, and my father wrote, “All that remains are a cemetery and cellar holes.”]

March 12. March Birds. Yesterday I had a couple of new birds including the Pine Siskin and the Red-winged Blackbird! The cute little Pine Siskins blend in with the goldfinches and often travel together. If you have a “charm” of goldfinches, look closely and you might just see one! Photos of birds at the feeder.

In our backyard: On days when the ice melts in the center of the beaver pond the water looks like a pool of olive oil. Goldfinches have arrived to join the winter birds at the feeder—chickadees, tree sparrows, juncos, blue jays, tufted titmouses (whose plural is debated; titmice?). I keep hoping to hear from the bare lilac bush or the woods a chickadee’s springtime whistle, clear and pure and LOUD!

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

DONUTS AFTER DARTMOUTH

March 9, 2025

           Last Tuesday the sky was cloudy but I was so ecstatic about seeing the Outside World that I thought of the clouds as pearl-luminescent. Wanda and I set forth at 7:30 a.m. on our latest two-hour trip to Dartmouth-Hitchcock for my every-three-months  steroid shot.
          Along the roads the snowbanks had been plowed high during snow-stormy February but were shrinking; this white scenery in March was trimmed with dark road grit. In THE CHEERLEADER I described it, “The shrunken snowbanks looked like heaps of frozen ashes.”
          Bob houses on Meredith Bay, but for how long with rain in the week’s forecast? The Route 104 Diner’s sign said:

LIP SMAC ‘N’ CHEESE

          There was a long-suffering look to the fronts of houses, a winter of shoveling and snow-blowing and plowing. Some driveways and walkways were still kept wide, others had become trenches or slots.
In Enfield as usual we waved to the Dunkin’ Donuts, promising a stop on our return trip. I mentioned to Wanda that the cover of March issue of DOWN EAST magazine announced “The Hole Story,” illustrated with a big glazed doughnut.
          As usual upon our arrival at Dartmouth-Hitchcock we didn’t use my walker; staff waited with wheelchairs and a nice man wheeled me indoors as Wanda drove on to seek a parking space. My favorite pastime while waiting is to observe people’s footgear. Some brave souls (can’t resist that pun) wore sneakers but mostly I saw a variety of boots from well-worn to spiffy—and a little girl’s pink-flowered boots. Also, the furry feet and entire black-and-white-spotted coat of a Dalmation service dog!
On our return trip, we did stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts. In the DOWN EAST issue, Editor-in-Chief Will Grunewald on his “Dooryard” editorial page had reassured me that the author of the cover story had lived to tell the tale: “DOWN EAST editorial assistant Charlie Pike consumed, on average, more than a doughnut per day over the several weeks he spent bouncing around the state to report on doughnuts (don’t worry—he seems okay) . . . ” Whew! I turned to the article.
          As I’ve written about here before, Maine says that Captain Hanson Gregory invented the doughnut hole. Charlie Pike describes the various versions of how he did it. My favorite: “At the turn of the century Gregory was quoted in the BOSTON POST and WASHINGTON POST explaining that he first used a tin pepper box to cut a hole in the undercooked middle of some fried dough in 1847.”
Then there comes Charlie Pike’s fun description of his doughnut travels. He has a surprise ending: “At Lil’s, a café and bakery in Kittery, the house specialty is crullers. Crispy on the outside, airy and eggy on the inside, these turned out to be my absolute favorite bites in all of my doughnut touring . . . the French cruller.” I was puzzled. French crullers? In my childhood we just called them crullers. At Laconia’s wonderful Laflamme’s Bakery they were crullers. And later I met Marion, Don’s mother, who, unlike my mother who only made doughnuts (with Penny and me helping), always made crullers, not doughnuts. Like Laflamme’s, Marion’s crullers were not round; they were straight strips of twisted dough. And not “airy and eggy,” just doughnut-y,
So of course at Dunkin’ Donuts I ordered a French cruller. To be on the safe side, I also ordered an Old Fashioned Doughnut. Glazed, the French cruller was round and certainly was airy and eggy!
Onward we went, homeward bound. In Canaan, Mount Cardigan loomed dark blue with a white summit over the town’s houses, main street, church steeples. When we reached the Route 104 Diner the other side of sign said:

CHICKEN TENDER

LOVE AND CARE

When I got home I immediately consulted my mother’s 1937 edition of Fannie Farmer’s BOSTON COOKING-SCHOOL COOK BOOK, which we’d used for doughnuts and much else. There were two recipes for crullers, one with yeast and one without, both shaped the same way: “Cut in strips in 8 inches long and ¾ inch wide . . . Twist several times and pinch ends together.” Yes!

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS

March 2, 2025

            Recently I received a letter from a dear friend who asked, “Where did you ever get the idea of having a castle on an island?” I explained that the inspiration for the Hutchinson castle on Quarry Island was an estate on a mountain in Moultonborough, New Hampshire.
            And this estate became known as a castle.
            When I had to replace a hike in 50 MORE HIKES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, I chose a trail up Mount Roberts near the castle. Introducing the hike, I wrote:
            “When I was a little girl the property now called Castle in the Clouds was still known as the Plant Estate, though at the time it was owned by the Tobey family. A daughter, Elizabeth Tobey Gonnerman, was married to my father’s college roommate, and thus my sister and I had the fun of visiting the place informally—so informally, in fact, that our favorite snapshot taken there showed Dan laughing atop a high stone gatepost he’d climbed.
            “Thomas G. Plant made his fortune in the shoe industry and continued industrious in his retirement, when he bought 8 square miles of the Ossipee Range. In 1913 he began building Lucknow as a wedding present for his young second wife, naming the 16-room mansion after a town in India, spending a million dollars and employing a thousand workers in its construction, installing such innovations as a central vacuuming system, and tucking a secret room into the library.
            “Eventually, as Castle in the Clouds, the estate was opened to the public, with tours of both the mansion and the bottling company that had been developed to take advantage of the two huge springs that supplied the mansion.
            “Then in 2002 the Lakes Region Conservation Trust bought this 5,400-acre property in the Ossipee Mountain Ring Dike and created the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area. The various trails in this volcanic circle have now been blazed and mapped; many of them are on old carriage roads and thus are wide with an easy grade. You can explore on short hikes or long, or you can simply enjoy a picnic at the tables by Shannon Pond, watching rainbow trout. I’ve chosen a hike up 2,582-foot Mount Roberts for its many views.”
            From a distance the castle is red roofs in a mass of woodsy green. So as I was writing A BORN MANIAC and inventing Quarry Island, I described Puddles’s first sight of the Hutchinson castle: “Then she made out red tile roofs against the thick forested pelt of the mountain beyond.” From there I went on to exaggerate and invent everything else about the castle, such its “high gray towers and turrets and ramparts and battlements.”
            However, I didn’t invent the galamander though I did bring it indoors to the castle’s hall, itself sheer invention. Don and I saw a galamander on display outdoors on the Maine island of Vinalhaven and learned its purpose. Thus:

        They entered a huge oak-paneled hall filled with assorted loot that her [Aunt Izzy’s] father must’ve brought back from his travels, such as tapestries and suits of armor, but what loomed largest was a—
            Puddles asked, “What on earth is that?”
            Blivit said, “A galamander.  It’s sort of a forklift, for moving granite blocks.”
            The immense wagon was painted blue like a toy, but it must be twenty feet long, ten feet wide, and its rear wheels ten feet high. Chains hung beneath. Guy [Puddles’s first husband] would’ve been fascinated.

            Don certainly was!

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

DAN DOAN'S BIRTHDAY

February 23, 2025

            Today is my father’s birthday.
            He was born in 1914. After I began updating his hiking books, I wrote in one of my prefaces to new editions of 50 HIKES IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS:

            “His roots were in Orford, New Hampshire, where his maternal grandmother was born. His father was a Unitarian minister, and the family lived in other states, but as Dan wrote, ‘Orford had been a constant in my life because our house there was my summer home all through my boyhood. Aunts, uncles, and cousins near or distant lived there summers or year-round. Falling in love with a locality can be as powerful an emotion as falling in love with a person. In some form it lasts a lifetime.’
            “It was here that Dan began exploring the woods and first climbed Mount Cube and Smarts Mountain . . .
            “Then in 1929, two years after his father died in Winchester, Massachusetts, Dan moved with his mother to Hanover and thus at age fifteen came to live permanently in New Hampshire. After he graduated from Dartmouth, he and my mother, Ernestine, set up housekeeping on a chicken farm in Orfordville. After this they bought a chicken farm in Belmont, where Penny and I were born.
            “Dan’s plan was to earn a living by farming and by writing short stories. In those days, magazines published a lot of stories and paid well for them. Dan later commented, his tone ironic, ‘I even thought the plan was sound.’ The eggs sold and some of the stories sold, but it wasn’t enough to support the family. So after Penny was born we moved to Laconia and Dan went to work at a manufacturing company, Scott & Williams.
            “He had given up farming but he didn’t give up writing. His first novel, THE CRYSTAL YEARS, was published in 1952. It’s a coming-of-age tale about a boy who moves from Boston to New Hampshire. AMOS JACKMAN, published in 1957, was inspired by the town of Quinttown, whose abandoned farmland he had discovered while fishing near Smarts Mountain.
            “After retiring at age 51, Dan taught briefly at the short-lived Gunstock College in Laconia and devoted himself to writing and hiking—and writing ABOUT hiking. The result was the two hiking books that have become classics: the one you’re reading and its sequel, 50 MORE HIKES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.
            “He also wrote a history of New Hampshire’s North Country called INDIAN STREAM REPUBLIC: SETTLING A NEW ENGLAND FRONTIER, 1785-1842. This was published posthumously in 1997.
            In 1982 my mother died. Dan married Marjorie, a hiking friend, and they moved to Jefferson, New Hampshire. There Dan wrote OUR LAST BACKPACK, about a weeklong hike in the Mahoosucs . . . The book was published just before his death [in 1993]. . .”
            Because Dan’s birthday was so close to George Washington’s, my mother was apt to make a Washington Pie for his birthday cake—which intrigued Penny and me because, like Boston Cream Pie, it wasn’t a pie; it was a yellow cake with raspberry jam filling and confectioner’s sugar on top!

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

FILE FOLDERS

February 16, 2025

Lately I’ve been exploring my desk’s big drawer’s accumulation of file folders that go back decades, most of them stuffed with clippings, photocopies, and notes that all had something-or-other to do with writing.

Here are three of my favorites so far:

My father subscribed to FIELD & STREAM magazine, and this faded photocopy of one page must have come from it. The introduction said, “Throughout its years, FIELD & STREAM has published the works of many great humorists. In 1958, it acquired its own resident wit, and since then Ed Zern has kept people laughing over such classics as the much-quoted ‘Book Review’ of 1959.”

That “Book Review” is shown (I’ll be giggling as I type it):

“Although written many years ago, LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book can not take the place of J. R. Miller’s PRACTICAL GAMEKEEPING.”
I found more CHATTERLEY amusement in a torn-out page from the May 1989 issue of SATURDAY REVIEW magazine. I’d saved Peter Davison’s review of Philip Larkin’s COLLECTED POEMS. As I’ve mentioned here, Don and I became Philip Larkin fans when we read him for the first time during the summer of 1965 while Don was getting a start on his master’s degree by taking a poetry course at Oxford’s summer school. The book review begins, “Philip Larkin, perhaps the finest English poet of his generation, died in 1985 at the age of sixty-three.” In the review are two quotations, one of them is:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the CHATTERLEY ban
And the Beatles’ first L.P.

Also in the file folders there was a sheet of typewriter paper darkened and crumbling with time on which I’d copied from somewhere Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’s advice to writers:
“Always stop while you are going good. Then when you resume you have the impetus of feeling what you last did was good. Don’t wait until you are baffled.
“Generalizations are no use —give one specific thing and let the action say it.
“When you have people talking, you have a scene. You must interrupt with explanatory paragraphs but shorten them as much as you can. Dialogue is ACTION . . .
“You can’t know a book until you come to the end of it and then all the rest must be modified to fit that.”

Now onward I proceed, exploring the remaining file folders . . .

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

CHOCOLATE LOVERS' MONTH

February 9, 2025

Tuesday, February 11th, is the 70th anniversary of our first date. As I’ve explained, it wasn’t really a date. In the high-school gym after a basketball game there was as usual a dance; Don and I had both gone “stag” with our friends, his being upperclassmen. I happened to be dancing with Pat, a former beau, when Don noticed us. We were sophomores and Don was a senior, but he knew us enough to think it would be amusing to disconcert Pat by cutting in on him. So Don did. All three of us laughed. (As I may have mentioned, Don was very funny.) And Don and I danced and laughed and talked. And continued to dance. And he took me home.

It’s romantically convenient to have an anniversary near Valentine’s Day. Also it’s chocolately—February is National Chocolate Lovers Month!

I always remember Don’s favorite chocolate memory. A drugstore on Laconia’s main street had a soda fountain and booths where older kids gathered while we younger ones gazed in through the storefront windows. Don could always recite the specialty, “Fudge cake with chocolate ice cream and hot fudge sauce.”

Last year I wrote here about all the February chocolate on the Food Network. This year I’ve been startled by some unusual uses of chocolate.

On an episode of DELICIOUS MISS BROWN with a “chocolate theme,” Kardea dipped bacon in white chocolate! Then on a “chocolate theme” episode of GUY’S RANCH KITCHEN, as I puttered at my kitchen chores two chefs on the screen made the typical: chocolate malted milkshakes with chocolate-chip cookies and Blondies with white chocolate chips. But one chef made Chocolate Mole Pork and Beans with Chocolate Monkey Bread, another chef made Duck Confit with White Chocolate Whipped Potatoes (“the chocolate takes the place of butter and cream”), and another chef, one of my Food Network favorites, Aarti Segueira, known to Guy Fieri as “the spice queen,” made a Cauliflower and Chickpea Salad with Chocolate Figs and Chocolate Chutney—and I lost track of the spices. She won!

I thought of my Zucchini Chocolate Cake. It wasn’t really unusual but it helped use up the overabundance of zucchinis in our garden:

Zucchini Chocolate Cake

¾ c. butter or margarine
1 c. sugar
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla
2 c. grated zucchini, drained
½ c. milk
2 ½ c. all-purpose flour
1 c. baking cocoa
2 ½ t. baking powder
1 ½ t. baking soda
1 c. walnut pieces (not chopped walnuts)

Frosting: confectioner’s sugar

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in zucchini and milk.

Combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, with a fork. Add to zucchini mixture. Stir in walnuts.

Pour into a greased 12-cup fluted tube pan. Bake at 350 for 1 hour or until cake pulls away from sides of pan.

Cool on wire rack 10-15 minutes before removing from pan.
When cake has cooled, sprinkle with confectioner’s suga
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!
 

© 2025 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

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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