SOUP TO DOUGHNUTS

June 24, 2024

When Thane, my niece, came to visit recently she brought supper, a soup she had made, Posole Salad Soup, from Marion Cunningham’s SUPPER BOOK.
This soup was new to me. While Thane heated it up I watched, fascinated, as she diced an avocado to add at the end and arranged in a bowl the recipe’s extras to be served with it: chopped lettuce and cilantro. Then there were her own extras she liked to add, shredded Mexican Style Cheddar Jack and lime wedges.
I asked, “Lettuce atop a hot soup?” Thane explained that it had to be iceberg lettuce. She also explained that she added chopped chicken to the recipe.
We dined. A multi-taste-sensation delight! 
Of course I asked for this recipe, even though my serious cooking days are over, and Thane has given it to me from Marion Cunningham’s book:

“Posole Salad Soup
(Six Servings)
It may seem weird putting your salad in the middle of your soup. It isn’t.  The salad looks great and stays crunchy . . . adding a sparkling contrast in texture. Posole is the Spanish name for hominy soup.
4 cups chicken broth
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 cans canned stewed tomatoes, broken up
6 tablespoons masa harina in 1 cup cold water, blended until smooth. (Masa harina is corn treated with lime water and ground into flour.)
Salt and pepper to taste
3 cups canned yellow or white hominy, drained
1 cup coarsely chopped cilantro
2 cups coarsely chopped iceberg lettuce
1 avocado, peeled, pitted, and cut into 1” dice.
In a large saucepan, stir together the broth, cumin, tomatoes, masa harina mixture, salt and pepper, and hominy. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for five minutes, stirring occasionally. Toss together the cilantro and lettuce in a bowl. Add the avocado to the soup just before serving. Serve the soup and pass around the lettuce and cilantro at the table, letting everyone put some on top of their soup.”
The saying is “Soup to nuts,” but how about “to doughnuts”? Eek, I’ve realized I neglected to mention here National Doughnut Day, June 7th. Via TV I imagined celebrating it in Rockport, Maine, at their Rockport Donut Festival. I learned on Maine’s WCSH-TV and on Google that this weekend event was in honor of Captain Hanson Crockett Gregory of Clam Cove, Rockport, who invented the doughnut with a hole in the center in 1847 when, he later said, he used the top of a round tin pepper box to cut into the middle of a doughnut. Why? There are various reasons, speculations. The reason given on WCSH-TV is that the “fried dough didn’t cook through so he cut out the middle,” and I’ll go along with that.
In the June 18th issue of THE LACONIA DAILY SUN, in Warren Huse’s “Our Yesterdays” column there was this item: “75 Years Ago, THE LACONIA EVENING CITIZEN, 1949. From a start made 22 years earlier, in 1927, ‘with the first doughnut machine in the city, Maurice Cote now produces a full line of taste-tempting bakery goods at 644 Main Street,’ the Comet Food Shop.” This brought back memories of the Laconia bakery we loved in our childhood, Laflamme’s. My sister, Penny, always remembered the amount a doughnut there cost out of her twenty-five-cents-a-week allowance: seven cents, I think.
And after his Laconia youth, Don spent his life in a quest for a chocolate doughnut as good as Laflamme’s.
I’ve also realized that when I wrote about the anniversary of our engagement I neglected to mention that before wearing Don’s class ring and fraternity pin I had worn his little gold football on a chain around my neck, as Snowy wore Tom’s.

          © 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.   

 

  “TRIED AND TRUE BEAUTY,” ETC.

June 17, 2024

Last week I was doing some kitchen chores with the TODAY SHOW when I heard the hosts begin talking about the return of “Tried and True Beauty.” I hastened over to the Shaker rocker and plunked myself down in front of the TV as they discussed these old-fashioned beauty products that are being rediscovered:
Pond’s Cold Cream. In my childhood I used to sit on the four-poster in my parents’ bedroom and watch, rapt, as my mother at her dressing table took off her makeup—powder, rouge, lipstick—with cold cream. That dressing table eventually came to our house and Don and I put it in the only available space—in the dining room. So it has china on it, and I’ve never sat at it, nor have I used cold cream, just soap and water. However, I use Pond’s Face Cream for a night cream. (A few years ago a friend asked what I use on my face. When I replied, “Pond’s at night, Olay by day,” she laughed and said she’d read that this what most women of a certain age use—and I joined in the laughter.)
Noxzema Deep Cleansing Cream. Noxzema! A ton of it was applied in THE CHEERLEADER days! I hadn’t realized it still existed.
Smith’s Rosebud Salve. This was new to me.
Estee Lauder Double Wear Foundation. This is one Estee Lauder product I haven’t tried.
Maybelline Great Lash Mascara. How funny, a coincidence! Last year after decades of using other mascaras, when I was in Rite Aid I found myself pausing at the Maybelline section and, for old times’ sake, buying Great Lash.
Revlon Classic Eyelash Curler. Never did I dare try this!
Dove White Beauty Bar. Ah yes, this is my soap, Dove Sensitive Skin.
Guerlain Shalimar. Don’s mother’s perfume!
Last week I was also sent traipsing down memory lane by Warren Huse’s “Our Yesterdays” column in THE LACONIA DAILY SUN: 
“75 Years Ago from THE LACONIA EVENING CITIZEN, 1949. A shipment of the new colored oleomargarine arrived at the First National store and would ‘retail here about ten cents above the regular cost of the old type product.’” I wonder if this was the kind that had a button of food coloring that you kneaded into the oleo to turn it from lard-white to buttery. Don remembered how he and his brother used to play catch with the oleo package to work the color in.
Warren continued in 1949:
“Stops had been designated for buses of the Laconia Street Railway, as they passed through the center of the city ‘to cooperate with the police department who have found that frequent and hit-or-miss stopping interferes with traffic.’ Going south, buses would now stop at O’Shea’s, Story Drug and the Court Street corner. North-bound, they would stop at Baldi’s store, Keller’s store, the Woolworth junction of Main and Pleasant streets, at the corner of Veterans Square and Pleasant Street at Salta’s (later Emanuel’s Quality Market).” This is the map in my head for fictional Gunthwaite, with O’Shea’s becoming “Dunlap’s Department Store.” “Keller’s store” was Keller’s candy store and restaurant, where Sally (my best friend) and I waitressed the summer of 1956; it of course became the fictional Sweetland—and I got confusing to locals when I chose that Sweetland name because it was the real name of an earlier Main Street restaurant but I just couldn’t resist.
And Woolworth’s was always Woolworth’s. In my childhood I made Father’s Day cards but later I would’ve bought one there.
Happy Father’s Day!  

 

          © 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.   

 

   A SHAVING HORSE, ETC.

June 10, 2024

On the June 1st Sandwich Board I saw a post with a puzzling subject: “In Search of English-style Shaving Horse.” I read:

“Greetings Boarders. I have building plans for such a beast, but was curious if anyone out there might have a shaving horse they would like to sell to a good home.”

I wondered: what the hell is a shaving horse? I went on to read other posts. When I returned to this one, somebody had posted, “What’s a shaving horse?” and in answer a photo had been posted with an explanation: 
“A shaving horse (shave horse or shaving bench) is a combination of vise and workbench, used for green woodworking. Typical use of the shaving horse is to create a round profile along a square piece, such as for a chair leg or to prepare a workpiece for the pole lathe. They are used in crafts such as coopering and bowyery.”
This time I Googled. As I’d guessed, “green woodworking” is a “form of woodworking that uses unseasoned or ‘green’ timber,” “coopering” is “making or repairing wooden casks or tubs,” and “bowyery” is making the kind of bows that aren’t made with ribbons.
In all my years with Don the woodworker, I’d learned the names for various implements and techniques. As I’ve written about before, I especially liked learning that “sistering” means putting one board beside another for support. But I had never heard him mention a shaving horse—and of course I won’t make a joke here about how this was because Don wore a beard.
Other Sandwich Board posts I’ve enjoyed:

“Free Hostas. Pre-dug: by the mailbox. U-Dig: come by today (Saturday) or tomorrow and I’ll show you where.”
In a garden Penny created (sistering!) for a summer place Don and I looked after, there was a lovely display of hostas. One morning when Don and I arrived I found the hostas gone. I phoned Penny in Maine and wailed, “Something ate them!” “Deer,” Penny replied philosophically.

“Baby Robins. The Robinsons made this beautiful nest on top of a wreath hanging on the front door.” Photo of three babies, two of them mostly beaks.
Recently when niece Thane and her husband James were visiting, James took a photo with his phone of the baby phoebes in the nest under the eaves of the ell. When Don and I moved here in 1976, in the backyard there was a decrepit old shed that phoebes had chosen for their nest. Later when Don tore down the shed he saved the nest and put it in this ell spot, hoping they’d find it come spring. They did. Every spring here’s always a lot of fluttering around the ell and their “Phoebe!” call is constant amid all the birdsong.

“Congratulations! Congratulations to the Boro Baking Company in Moultonborough for coming in SECOND place in the ENTIRE state of New Hampshire for the best cakes! So proud of my daughter!”
Comments: “Fabulous!” “That’s great! Good for her!”
The post was from Theresa Hanks. Daughter Jennifer Clifford opened the Boro after becoming a finalist in the Food Network’s Holiday Baking Challenge in 2019.
Before this, Jennifer had been the head baker at Moultonborough’s Cup & Crumb bakery and café, which Don and I frequented. I can report from happy experience that the Boro’s scones and croissants are delectable. 
Congratulations, Boro!
       

 

          © 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.   

FAREWELL, WEIRS DRIVE-IN!

June 3, 2024

On a Friday evening, May 24, 1957, Don and I went to the Weirs Drive-in Theater (nicknamed the Passion Pit) as we had so often done during our dating years, but this time was special, with a surprise: he gave me an engagement ring!
During those years I’d worn his class ring on a chain and then I’d pinned his fraternity pin on my blouses and sweaters. Now I had a diamond ring from Laconia’s Sawyer’s Jewelry Store. My senior year in high school was ending; I’d be heading off to Bennington College and Don would be taking a break after two years at Keene Teachers’ College to do a two-hitch in the Coast Guard. Ye gods, youth!
So last month was the 67th anniversary of that event at the drive-in, and I thought of an article I’d recently read (and saved) from the April 30th issue of THE LACONIA DAILY SUN. The front-page story written by Adam Drapcho had a sad headline: “Drive-in Will Stay Dark This Summer.” It began:
“WEIRS BEACH — This summer, for the first time in seven decades, the screens at the Weirs Drive-In will stay dark, as the owner said she doesn’t have the energy to run the business for another season.
“‘I’m going to be 86 years old, it’s too much for me to run it by myself. My son has usually helped me out in the past, he’s moved to Florida; I just don’t think I’ll be able to run it,’ said Pat Baldi . . . 
“Business at the drive-in has been fine, Baldi said. ‘It always paid its own way, but it was pretty marginal. I’m at the point where I want to sell it, it’s probably not going to be a drive-in, but maybe it will, who knows?’
“The Weirs Drive-in dates back to the late 1940s when similar venues were opening across the country. . .  Pat, along with her late husband, Larry Baldi, bought the business in 1974.
“The drive-in would frequently sell out during weekend shows, Baldi said, but it was always limited by the short season in northern New England . . . 
“‘It was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed it,’ Baldi said about running the business . . . 
“This isn’t the first time drive-in operations were expected to cease. In  2017 a developer was negotiating purchasing the property for $2.5 million and developing it into condominiums and commercial spaces. However, the deal fell through over concerns about the potential of significant archaeological remains that might be just below the surface.
“The office of the state’s archaeologist considers The Weirs to be an area of significant archaeological interest, owing to thousands of years of use by indigenous Americans as a prime fishing ground.
“An archaeological dig conducted by the University of New Hampshire in 1976 found artifacts in the region dating back 10,000 years. Last year, a team from Dartmouth College uncovered arrowheads thought to be 8,000 years old.”
Reading the article’s concluding paragraphs, I couldn’t help musing about what might have been found if the dig had begun in the drive-in’s layers.
I’ve quoted before from A GUNTHWAITE GIRL when writing posts about the Weirs Drive-in, and here’s that scene again. During a tour of their hometown Snowy and Bev and Puddles stop at the gate bar of the drive-in theater, closed at that time of day. As they sit in Bev’s car observing the scene, Puddles notes that there aren’t any speakers:

“Radio,” Bev said. “It’s done via radio nowadays. Roger explained how, but I tuned him out. I miss the speakers. Remember how people would forget they had a speaker in the window and they’d drive away, snapping the cord?”
Puddles said incredulously, “You mean you and Roger still go to this drive-in?”
“Once in a while,” Bev replied.
“I’ll be damned,” Puddles said. “Well, I’m betting that at your age, you two actually watch the movie.”
Bev made her demure-maiden face in the rearview mirror at Puddles, then crossed her eyes. “Mostly. We miss the old cars’ bench seats, though.”

P.S. The engagement ring was joined by a wedding ring much sooner than we’d dreamed on May 24th at the drive-in. Don learned that while he was in the Coast Guard his “dependent” (wife) would receive a hundred dollars a month. Wow! So for purely economic reasons, of course, not romantic reasons, we got married in October.

 

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.   

BACKYARD SIGHTS

May 26, 2024

          Early one morning I looked out a kitchen window into the backyard and saw a porcupine waddling onto the dandelions-dotted lawn. This was the day that Jere, who takes care of the house and yard, would be arriving for the first lawn-mowing of the season; the porcupine had got ahead of him and was deep in the luxurious grass, snipping at blades of it. Then the porcupine came to a dandelion. Would he eat that too? 

He sure would! He devoured it and onward he waddled in the grass, eating dandelion after dandelion, obviously blissful. I was suddenly reminded of an F. Scott Fitzgerald quotation, not, I think, from a novel but maybe from his notebooks: a sweet starlet says reminiscently about a country home she’d had, “All summer long I was up to my ass in daisies.” 

Coincidence: That very morning on the Sandwich Board the “Thoreau Comes to Sandwich” post had a photograph of dandelion and Thoreau’s quotation: “I was ready to say that I had seen no more beautiful flower than the dandelion. That has the vernal scent. How many flowers have no peculiar scent but only the simple vernal fragrance?” 

This reminded me that I never can describe the fragrance of daffodils. Maybe it’s also “vernal”? 

About a week and a half before the porcupine’s visit I looked out a window at the backyard in hopes of seeing ducks on the beaver pond, and what did I see instead? On the far side of the pond a bear ambled along, then vanished into the woods. Another sight in the backyard is the clump of rhubarb growing in the middle of the lower lawn where our garden used to be. When I stopped gardening I couldn’t bring myself to dig it up and throw it away; there was its history with us and the stewed rhubarb and rhubarb pie I’d made and its greater history of how chunks of this “pie plant” went West on wagon trains. So here it still is every spring. 

In the Spring 2024 issue of THE LAKER HOME the section titled “Fresh Recipes to Welcome Spring to Your Kitchen” has a rhubarb recipe I would surely have made in my serious cooking-and-gardening years. It begins, “ . . . this salmon dish is as scrumptious as it is unique . . . The recipe is for two of you, so adjust accordingly if feeding more:

 “Baked Salmon with Rhubarb

 2 shallots, or sub ½ a red onion 
2 stalks rhubarb, 12 inches long each
2 tbsp olive oil 
2 center cut salmon filets, 6 oz. each, skinless, the thicker, all the better 
3-4 tbsp maple syrup 2 tbsp sherry cooking wine, or sub 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar, but better with the sherry
Salt and pepper to taste 
8 sprigs fresh thyme 
1 bunch chard leaves chopped, stems chopped thinly and separated 
1 tbsp olive oil 
4 fat garlic cloves, rough chopped 
Salt and pepper to taste 
1 tsp lemon zest 
Juice of 1 lemon 

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Slice shallots into thin wedges, long ways. Cut rhubarb in half lengthwise and then cut into 4-inch pieces. In a large ovenproof skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Saute shallots for 3-4 minutes, until just tender and fragrant. Add rhubarb, sautéing for one minute. Push shallots and rhubarb to the outer edges of the pan and place salmon in the center. Season salmon and rhubarb with a little salt and pepper. Drizzle maple syrup just over rhubarb. Drizzle sherry wine, or balsamic, over the rhubarb. Sprinkle with ½ of the thyme leaves, saving ½ for garnish at the end. Place in the oven and roast for 15 minutes. Check salmon after 10 and pull if ready but continue cooking rhubarb for full 15 mins or when it is fork tender. 

While the salmon is in the oven, in another skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add garlic and sauté until golden, about 2 minutes. Add chard stems, sauté for 1-2 minutes, then add remaining chard and season with salt, pepper, lemon zest, and a little squeeze of the lemon. Set it aside. 

Plate the salmon and divide rhubarb shallot mixture between the two plates. Add the wilted chard. Spoon the flavorful liquid from the salmon pan over the salmon itself. Garnish with the remaining sprigs of thyme. Enjoy!” 

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.   

THOREAU AND DUNKIN’ DONUTS 

May 19, 2024

Recently my dear friend Wanda and I made our latest trip to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital in Lebanon, NH, our first since March.
Now in May the springtime had entered what I call “the Monet season” with trees leafing out in a delicate green haze, always reminding me of how I fell in love with Monet on the Girl Scout Trip to Washington where the places we visited included the National Gallery and in the gift shop I splurged on a Monet postcard, not to send but to save.
Wanda and I set forth down a hill, then along Squam Lake. And I thought of Henry David Thoreau. (As I’ve mentioned before, my Grandmother Ruth was born and grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau’s town, where the last name is pronounced THOR-oh so that’s certainly the way I pronounce it!) A Sandwich resident, Allan DiBiase, has a wonderful daily post on the Sandwich Board called “Thoreau Comes to Sandwich,” in which Allan puts a quotation from Thoreau illustrated by one of Allan’s fine photographs. On May 8th the photo had been a simple blue rectangle of rippling water. Maybe Squam Lake? The Thoreau quotation was:
“ . . . We are slow to realize water—the healing magic of it. It is interestingly strange forever . . . I look round with a thrill on this bright fluctuating surface on which no man can walk—whereon is—no trace of foot step—unstained as glass.”
Wanda and I progressed: green leaves, green lawns, yellow forsythia and daffodils, the towns of Center Harbor and Meredith. When we reached New Hampton, the Route 104 Diner’s told us to “Be Bop On In.”
In the woods along the way I saw white blossoming bushes; Penny and I had learned from Dan, our father, that they were shadbushes. And I thought of Thoreau and mayflowers. Penny and I had learned from Dan’s searches what a treasure these were to be found in the woods, seen rarely, their fragrance the loveliest ever. On the April 29th “Thoreau Comes to Sandwich” post there had been a photograph of a shy mayflower and this quotation:
“The may-flower on the point of blossoming—and I think I may say it will blossom tomorrow. The blossoms of this plant are remarkably concealed beneath the leaves—perhaps for protection—It is singularly unpretending—not seeking to exhibit or display its simple beauty. It is the most delicate flower both to eye and scent as yet—Its weather worn leaves do not adorn it. If it had fresh spring leaves it would be more famous and sought after.” 
On Wanda and I went, past now-familiar signs: Haunted Whispers Vineyard in Danbury; A Farm Girl’s Finds—Handcrafters & Vintage Market in Enfield; Primitive Pickings nursery and farmstand in Lebanon.
After my appointment, as usual we stopped in Enfield at the Dunkin’ Donuts. During our daily morning phone call, Thane, my niece, had suggested I try the Avocado Toast. Even during the years of the Avocado Toast craze, even though I love avocados and often buy them at the grocery store, I had somehow never got around to making this or ordering it out. Thane’s suggestion inspired me to Google Dunkin’s version and I read that it was introduced in 2021 and is made with mashed avocados, sea salt, black pepper, and lemon juice, spread on sourdough bread and sprinkled with Everything Bagel seasoning. So I ordered one. At long last, an Avocado Toast! Thane had also suggested I get “a doughnut for tomorrow.” I did.
As we passed the Route 104 Diner, the other side of their sign said: “Eyes on the Pies.”

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

 

CAFETERIA AND STORYBOOK FOOD

May 12, 2024

In THE CHEERLEADER, I wrote:
“The smell of the cafeteria lunch had been seeping through the school since morning. As usual, it had a special smell of its own, totally unlike the smell of home cooking, yet the result, instead of a gastronomic surprise, was always just something like chipped beef and sick peas. Snowy would have enjoyed even that, but . . .”

Et cetera!

I thought of the Laconia High School cafeteria recently when I was watching THE KITCHEN on the Food Network. This particular show was devoted to “Cafeteria Classics”—and I laughed when their classics proved to be meals we’d never had in our cafeteria in the 1950s.
Pizza! In HENRIETTA SNOW Tom says jokingly, “It hadn’t been invented back then.” By my senior year it had appeared in stores and my home (small frozen ones and Chef Boyardee kits) but not in the cafeteria. On THE KITCHEN one of the chefs, Sunny, recalled her school cafeteria’s square pizzas with little meatballs and for this “School Lunch Redo” she made an updated pizza on focaccia bread cut in half for the crust, with pizza sauce (not marinara, she emphasized) and basil, oregano, and hot honey (!), finished off with mozzarella and Parmesan. She and chef Katy reminisced about the shaker of cheese at the end of the cafeteria line.

Chicken Fingers! Katy recalled how she’d wanted to start a petition to get a chicken-fingers line separate from the regular line. Chicken fingers also hadn’t been invented in our day. Sloppy Joes! Out of curiosity I made this once but Don and I found it so—sloppy that I returned to putting ground beef in patties or meatloaf. Cookies? The chefs’ memories of cafeteria “undercooked, doughy, chewy cookies” were sort of familiar but I mainly remember puddings for dessert.
As the chefs made jazzed-up versions of these foods, I did more old-fogey laughing over their reminisces, especially over their nostalgia for small square cartons of milk. WE had small glass bottles that were recycled.
Other food with memories, these of storybooks: Last month on Maine’s WMTW Channel 8, reporter Jim Keithley did a restaurant review of Indy’s Restaurant in South Portland, “a sandwich shop with menu items right out of a children’s book.”  I Googled it for more details, of course. Examples: The Mother Goose is a turkey sandwich; the Henny Penny has “double-fried chicken thighs with teriyaki mayo on a brioche bun”; the Three Little Pigs has three types of pork; and the Jack and the Beanstalk is a vegetarian sandwich with “cauliflower, house-made relish, fig spread, mozzarella, pressed in ciabatta bread.” The Peter Rabbit is not made with bunny meat but with “bacon, mushrooms, spinach, red onion, olive spread, goat cheese, provolone, pressed in rustic bread.”
Of all the storybook food I yearned for in my childhood, I remember most the lady fingers and cream puffs in Raggedy Ann’s magic pocket.
Though National Poetry Month is over, I can’t resist quoting from another poem, a favorite I’ve quoted here before about childhood treats, by Christopher Morley:
Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink,
That is the finest of suppers, I think;
When I’m grown up and can have what I please
I think I shall always insist upon these.

What do YOU choose when you’re offered a treat?
When Mother says, “What would you like best to eat?”
Is it waffles and syrup, or cinnamon toast?
It’s cocoa and animals that I love the most!

Happy Mother’s Day!

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

LOST AND FOUND

May 5, 2024

            On a recent WCSH-TV “Morning Report” the Daily Stumper asked, “Where was the first English colony established in Maine?” The multiple-choice answers began with: (a) Phippsburg; (b) Portland—and then I didn’t pay attention to (c) and (d) because I knew the answer. The show’s three hosts also got it right: Phippsburg.
            I heard about this colony when our parents returned from a getaway trip they made to Maine while Penny and I stayed with our grandparents. Dan and Ernie talked about Popham Colony, an abandoned colony, lost. Its story grabbed my attention and I wrote a junior-high paper that I titled “The Lost Colony,” illustrating it with a snapshot Dan had taken of Popham Beach.
            After the Stumper, I refreshed my memory with Wikipedia. The colony was founded on May 4, 1607. Wow, this May 2024 is the 417th anniversary of ship’s arrival with its cargo of hopes and adventurous spirits! Wikipedia continued, “It was called ‘Popham’ after its principal financial backer, Sir John Popham . . . the Lord Chief Justice of England . . .
            “Late summer arrival meant that there was no time to farm for food . . . half of the colonists returned to England in December 1607 . . . and almost starved to death on the return trip . . . others faced a cold winter during which the Kennebec River froze.” The winter. During their Morning-Stumper chat about Popham Colony one of the hosts asked, “Why did they leave?” And then in unison he and the other two answered, “Maine winters!”
            Wikipedia went on, “In May a supply ship brought a message that Sir John Popham had died . . . The colony lasted 14 months. It is likely that the failure of the colony was due to multiple problems: the lack of financial support after the death of Sir John Popham, the inability to find another leader, the cold winter, and finally the hostility of both the native people and the French.” In 1997 excavations “uncovered the Admiral’s house, the storehouse, and a liquor [?!] storage building.”
            Decades after Dan and Ernie’s trip, when Don and I were on one of our Maine trips we made a side trip to Phippsburg so I could at last see the Popham area. The season was late autumn, chilly, and we walked on the empty beach, imagining.

            To change the subject from something lost to something found; that is, to one of the coincidences I seem to be finding more and more often nowadays:

            On the April 26th Sandwich Board I saw this post:
“I just stopped at a lovely lemonade stand on Bean Road, on the right, almost to Center Harbor. Sweet kids, sweet dog, sweet lemonade! It’s so fun to support young entrepreneurs.”
            I had just read a piece by Sonja Anderson in the “American Icon” section of the April/May issue of SMITHSONIAN magazine, “Sweet Dreams: The tangy tale of how America’s children learned to squeeze life for all it’s worth.” She wrote, “In the fall of 1839, New York City’s Apollo saloon hosted a ‘Ladies’ Fair,’ complete with live music, displays of artisan goods and, of course, refreshments. As the DAILY HERALD reported, ‘From the post office to the lemonade stand, bright eyes and smiling faces peered forth, as if heaven had at last been let loose and got a holiday.’ This rhapsodic description of a sun-kissed fete is also the first recorded mention of that most American of fixtures, the pop-up vendor hawking lemonade . . . 
            “Back then, though, selling lemonade was a grown-up’s business . . . in many poor families at the time, children were laborers who obeyed, not self-starting retailers. . . By 1918, every state had passed laws mandating that children attend school. This meant the emergence of summer vacation, and as children began to seek both pocket change and entertainment, the lemonade stand—offering the chance to play at business and for a cash reward, no less—presented itself as an apt activity.”
            When our family was living on Academy Street, Penny and a neighborhood friend, Mary, set up a Kool-Aid stand with pitcher and a card table on the tree-shaded sidewalk in front of our house. Somehow the Laconia newspaper learned about it and sent a reporter with a camera. Mary’s sister (who was my friend and also named Ruth) and I were included in the photograph; I recall that we big sisters tried to look adult and aloof. Penny and Mary looked young and enthusiastic; entrepreneurs!

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

ANTICIPATION

April 28, 2024

          At this time of year I keep thinking about a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson: “It is better to travel than to arrive.” And how I savor this season’s anticipation, how I yearn to have the early springtime stretch out and out!
          When Winifred and I were discussing dandelions last week she mentioned the tradition picking a gone-to-seed dandelion and making a wish while blowing on the fluff. Ah yes, I remember our mother teaching Penny and me to do that. Ernie, our mother, would also hold a buttercup under Penny’s chin and under my chin to see if we liked butter. And then there were the petals of daisies: He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me . . .
          The lawn here is still in the anticipation stage; it’s greening up fast but no dandelions yet or violets or wild strawberry plants. No buttercups or daisies. However, ferns and lilies of the valley are poking up in the dooryard—and the back yard’s daffodils have begun blooming. The Summersweet bush Don and I planted has buds.
          So does a bush we did not plant. Years ago when this unfamiliar scrap of bush began growing cozily against the back of the house and producing white blossoms, during a weekly phone call I asked Penny what it could be.  She immediately said, “Rosa multiflora! Louis Bromfield!” I immediately thought of Louis Bromfield’s novel THE RAINS CAME in our parents’ bookcases; at one stage it had been my favorite novel to reread. Then Penny reminded me of his other career, Malabar Farm, and told me how he and others had thought that Rosa multiflora would be great as natural fences before realizing that it was not a friend but an invasive enemy. I wailed, “Should Don and I get rid of it? It’s so pretty!” She suggested we just keep it under control.
          What we didn’t keep under control is the Rosa rugosa plant we bought in a pot in Maine. Lawn-mowing has kept it from spreading across the entire backyard but there’s  quite an expanse of it beautifully blooming deep pink in summer.
          The lilac bush is budding. When I wrote about lilacs earlier this month I forgot to mention that it’s the New Hampshire state flower. The May issue of NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE has an article (story and photography) by Matthew Mead about “Lilac Time.” It says, “Because the season is so short, we’ve created a few special ways to engage the lilac theme and experience its color and style at your home.” Of course what got most of my attention was the “Bake It” suggestion with a purple-y full-page photograph of a Lilac Cake: “Color-infuse a cake or cupcakes. Add a few drops of purple food coloring to your favorite cake batter to create colorful cake layers that pay homage to the season. You can also use fresh-cut blossoms to trim and garnish themed cupcakes for a seasonal gathering. Guests will marvel at the cake color upon cutting.” In the photo, white frosting and filling emphasize the purple layers. Would I have made this in my cake-baking years? Maybe, as an attempt to stretch the short season with a special treat.
          To end National Poetry Month, here’s another poem posted by the Yeoman’s Fund for the Arts on the Sandwich Board. It’s by Joseph Bruchac. The Yeoman’s note told us that he is the “Poet Laureate of Saratoga Springs, author of over 120 books for all ages, a storyteller, an enrolled citizen of the Abenaki Nation and, at 81, a martial arts instructor. He says, ‘We are all shaped by earth and words.’” 

          Birdfoot’s Grampa

          The old man
          must have stopped our car
          two dozen times to climb out
          and gather into his hands
          the small toads blinded
          by our lights and leaping,
          live drops of rain.
          The rain was falling,
          a mist about his white hair
          and I kept saying
          you can’t save them all,
          accept it, get back in
          we’ve got places to go.
          But, leathery hands full
          of wet brown life,
          knee deep in the summer
                    roadside grass,
          he just smiled and said
          they have places to go too.  

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

DANDELIONS AND JOY

April 21, 2024

          Recently when my dear friend Winifred and I were discussing dandelion greens, I explained that I’ve never picked or cooked them because Don had dandelion-greens PTSD. In his childhood, he would relate, he had to traipse around lawns after his grandmother, carrying a bag for the millions of dandelion leaves she would harvest. Then came washing them, which took FOREVER. His grandparents and parents lived in the Weirs, the lake-resort section of Laconia, and he could have been SWIMMING.
          Still, he did join me rejoicing at the springtime sight of dandelions and we never tried to rid our lawn of them.
          A coincidence: Soon after my discussion with Winifred I was reading the spring issue of THE LAKER HOME magazine and came to an article by Rosalie Triolo,

“Dandelions: Weed or Herb?” It told me, “For much of recorded history, dandelions have been used by humans as a source of food and as an herbal remedy used for medicinal purposes. Dandelion flowers were enjoyed by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and for centuries the Chinese used dandelions to treat liver diseases and digestive problems.
“The dandelion was introduced in America at the time of the Mayflower landing. Afterwards, Native Americans learned to boil the dandelions in water and use them as a remedy for upset stomachs and as a digestive aid. Dandelions are a rich source of vitamins A, C, and K, and the minerals calcium, iron, and potassium.
“Because its jagged-edged leaves resemble the sharp teeth of a lion, the plant derives its name from the Latin DENS LEONIS and the French DENT DE LION . . . 
“The green dent de lion-shaped leaves are a delicious addition to salads, sandwiches, and omelets, or sautéed with garlic and olive oil . . . there are several dandelion recipes you can find online: dandelion fritters, baking with dandelion petals, and brewing your own dandelion root coffee/tea . . . A country wine, dandelion wine, is brewed with citrus fruit, raisins, sugar, water, yeast, and dandelions.” 

          Wine! One spring I collected (on my own, sparing Don)) millions of dandelion blossoms from our lawn and neighbors’ lawns and made dandelion wine.
          Another coincidence: Last week on PBS I happened upon a program called AMERICA THE BOUNTIFUL and it mentioned making dandelion pesto. If I’d known, I would certainly have made that pesto in my serious cooking years.
          Our local Yeoman’s Fund for the Arts posts poems on the Sandwich Board throughout National Poetry Month. Here is one I liked a lot, by Holly J. Hughes:

          Mind Wanting More

          Only a beige slat of sun
          above the horizon, like a shade
          pulled not quite down. Otherwise,
          clouds. Sea rippled here and
          there. Birds reluctant to fly.
          The mind wants a shaft of sun to
          stir the gray porridge of clouds,
          an osprey to stitch sea to sky
          with its barred wings, some
          dramatic music: a symphony, perhaps
          a Chinese gong.

          But the mind always
          wants more than it has—
          one more bright day of sun;
          one more clear night in bed
          with the moon; one more hour
          to get the words right; one
          more chance for the heart in hiding
          to emerge from its thicket
          of dried grasses—if this quiet day
          with its tentative light weren’t enough,
          as if joy weren’t strewn all around.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

FIDDLEHEADS AND FLOWERS

April 14, 2024

            I’ve been traveling in my imagination to two places in Maine that are described in the March/April issue of YANKEE magazine by Bill Scheller: “Spring Flings: Longer, warmer days give even more reasons to explore these colorful, feel-good events and seasonal attractions.”
           The first Maine place that got my attention:

“Aroostook County Fiddlehead Festival, Presque Isle. Fiddleheads—those tightly curled, bright green ferns freshly popped up from the damp spring earth—are a popular foragers’ quarry in Aroostook County. They’re also the centerpiece of this annual festival featuring a fiddlehead cooking contest for both amateurs and professionals, a craft fair, live music, and fiddlehead picking at a designated spot where the tasty morsels grow. 5/18.”

           Imagine, all those fiddleheads! In the 1970s Don and I studied up about the baby ostrich ferns in two cookbooks, THE EDIBLE WILD by Berndt Berglund and Clare E. Bolsby and THE WEED COOKBOOK by Adrienne Crowhurst. We picked one meal in our yard but were a little nervous about our identification so afterward we bought fiddleheads at farmstands. Those cookbooks had recipes for steamed fiddleheads and fiddleheads with mushrooms or eggs and ham and pepperoni or oil and vinegar or creamed. I always just steamed them and we added lots of butter, salt, and pepper. Lovely.
           The other Maine place:

 “McLaughlin Garden and Homestead, South Paris. With more than 125 varieties of lilacs and gorgeous displays of phlox, daylilies, hostas, irises, primroses, and other spring-blooming favorites, one of Maine’s best-loved gardens was the vision of Bernard McLaughlin, ‘the dean of Maine gardeners.’ Mother’s Day weekend marks the beginning of lilac season and the opening of the garden’s two acres of colorful plantings and  its pond, rock, and pollinator gardens. Perennials and wildflowers are on sale from then through October.”

           Imagine the sight and scent of all those lilacs! Imagining, I look out the back door’s window at the dear old lilac bush that welcomed us when we moved here in 1976 and has kept us company ever since. And I remember how on hikes there were the poignant occasions of seeing a lilac bush still surviving beside a farmhouse cellar hole, the fields gone back to woods.
           As Amy Lowell wrote in her “Lilacs” poem:

Lilacs,
          False blue,
          White,
          Purple,
          Colour of lilac,
          Your great puffs of flowers
          Are everywhere in this my New England.
          Among your heart-shaped leaves
          Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
          Their little weak soft songs;
          In the crooks of your branches
          The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
          Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
          Of all Springs.
          Lilacs in dooryards
          Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;
          Lilacs watching a deserted house
          Lilacs, weather-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom
          Above a cellar dug into a hill.
          You are everywhere.
           You were everywhere . . . 

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

PASS THE POEMS, PLEASE

April 7,2024

          I spent the start of National Poetry Month driving myself crazy trying to remember a poem. I’d been listening to the audiobook of Patrick Taylor’s IRISH COUNTRY VILLAGE, which has quotations and sayings at the start of each chapter—without attribution. One of these quotations was “Full many a glorious morning have I seen.” It was so familiar! When I said it aloud, I could almost say the next line. I kept trying, refusing to give up and Google. Shakespeare too obvious? Wordsworth? WHO? The meter pulsed through my mind. And finally I gave up. Google told me it was indeed Shakespeare, his Sonnet 33: Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy . . . Okay! Now National Poetry Month could really begin! I was tickled to see on the Sandwich Board a description of how the Bearcamp Center for Sustainable Community in nearby South Tamworth is planning to celebrate the month with a “Pass the Poems, Please” dinner on April 12:

“The menu includes: rolls with herbed butter and oyster mushroom rillettes (a chunky, creamy spread); roasted asparagus and leeks tossed with walnuts and tarragon in a light white wine and mustard sauce; whole roasted onion stuffed with goat cheese mousse and topped with balsamic grapes; grilled carrots with pumpkin seed zhug and crispy ginger (zhug is a blend of seeds, herbs, citrus, and spice drizzled over the carrots); slow roasted lamb with plum sriracha; and bread pudding with heaps of whipped cream. A vegetarian entrée is available

. “Whether you love poetry or not, you’ll love the food and, if you dine in, the company. We’ll have poems for you to take home and just a few poetry readings at the beginning and end of the meal, and the rest of the dinner can be spent with your lovely table companions. “

The meal, as ever, is offered totally by donation. Some folks reserve a meal because they need a little extra food or to stretch their household budget, others join us for companionship, especially after a long winter. Some people simply want a delicious dinner they wouldn’t cook at home. Whatever your reason for coming, you’re welcome! Pay what or if you’re able or what you think the food is worth to our community.” 

To end this with another poem—On March 23rd winter returned, bringing Sandwich two feet of snow. Melting ensued in springtime sun and rain; a northeaster storm with more snow arrived last Wednesday and Thursday. I reread Robert Frost’s lines from “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which I’m apt to post here in April: 

  The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 
          You know how it is with an April day 
          When the sun is out and the wind is still,           
          You’re one month on in the middle of May.           
          But if you so much as dare to speak,           
          A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, 
          A wind comes off a frozen peak, 
          And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

 

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.