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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: July - September, 2024

SEPTEMBER SANDWICH BOARD

September 29, 2024

 Here’s a September Song—some Sandwich Board posts I’ve enjoyed this month:

Note: You can enjoy some of Allan DiBiase's photos (mentioned below) HERE.

Sept. 12, 2024; posted by Allan DiBiase: Thoreau Comes to Sandwich.
September 12, 1851 in Thoreau’s Journal: “This is the season of frogs.”

Photo: Allan DiBiase’s photo of dark water scattered with white light.

Sept. 10. Easy Banjo Jam Starting: We now have four players and will start meeting Thursday, October 3, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Sandwich town hall. Please spread the word and if you have always wanted to play the banjo, perhaps start thinking about coming over to see what all the hoopla is about. Free get-together, not a lesson. Plan on every other Thursday for now! [My memories: in 1965 I bought a five-string banjo and Pete Seeger’s book, How to Play the 5-String Banjo. Soon I was singing along with the banjo, Don joining in, the Weavers’ songs from our youth, “On Top of Old Smoky” and “Goodnight, Irene” and other songs . . . ]

Sept. 10. John Davidson tickets available for this Friday: Due to a scheduling conflict, I have two tickets available for this Friday night, which I believe is his second to last scheduled show. $75 for the two, which is face value. [Our celebrity, turning 83 this year, is having his “Grand Finale” at his Club Sandwich “barn performance club.”]

Sept. 14. Hummers gone: I’m calling it for this year, September 13th. The last female punched her round trip ticket to the Yucatan today. A little earlier than the last two years which were the 18th and the 22nd. Godspeed little birds.

Sept.  20. Windover Farm. Warning: Vampires may be in the area shortly—the closer we get to October. Our protection against them is garlic as it is rumored that vampires are averse to garlic.

We have large amounts of garlic among other items typical of the fall season. Don’t wait for the winter to be upon us; get your pumpkins, squash, onions, and the like now! [Memories: During my years of growing garlic I planted the cloves on Columbus Day. In recent years Don and I went to a Garlic Festival in Canterbury, NH!]

September 22, posted by Allan DiBiase: Thoreau Comes to Sandwich.
September 22, 1852 in Thoreau’s Journal: “It is a beautifully clear & bracing air with just enough coolness full of the memory of frosty morning—through which all things are distinctly seen & the fields look as smooth as velvet . . . the forests have a singularly rounder & bowery look clothing the hills right down to the water’s edge & leaving no shore; the Ponds are like drops of dew amid & partly covering the leaves. So the great globe is luxuriously crowded without margin.”

Photo: Allan’s beautifully clear photo of a wide blue brook curving through trees whose leaves have some red amid the green.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

 SOAP AND FRIENDS

September 22, 2024 

Have you seen the Dove soap commercial featuring the numerals 1957? The sight of them the TV screen startled me because they mean one thing to me, such a familiar date: the year of my Laconia High School class. I hadn’t realized it’s the year Dove was born.

In the commercial women are shown enjoying the soap from 2024 back through the years to the birthday of Dove. I have a cake of Dove (Sensitive) in the bathroom basin and another in the shower. But, I suddenly wondered, when had I started using Dove? Until September of 1957 I was living at home where my mother’s choices were Ivory and Palmolive. Then off I went to Bennington, where I bought my own soap. What brand? I think I continued with Palmolive; it was my favorite color, green.

I could not remember when Dove entered my life. But I’m betting it was in the late 1960s when a doctor diagnosed Don’s mysterious rash on his back as “Dial dermatitis” and we stopped using that!

Remembering soaps made me remember the only soap opera I ever watched faithfully. While we were living in a rented house in Lisbon, NH, from 1962 to 1964, I used to turn on the TV to “Young Doctor Malone” in the afternoons before Don was due home from teaching at the high school. Heathcliff (our border collie) and I would watch while we waited for him. Well, Heathcliff was doing more listening to the road than watching the screen; he could hear Don’s Jeep coming up a nearby hill before I could.

Last Tuesday I had a mini-reunion with three other members of the Class of 1957. We arranged to meet for lunch at the Village Kitchen in Moultonborough. I’ve written about this restaurant many times; because the owner was a classmate of my sister’s (Class of 1959) it has a Laconia High School connection in my mind. But eek, when Wanda and I got there, we saw that it was unexpectedly closed until Thursday. My classmates arrived from Laconia and we all decided to go to dear old Hart’s Turkey Farm Restaurant. So to Meredith we went.

Wanda and I had just been to Hart’s last month for Keene’s Golden Circle Luncheon. Wow, here was the opportunity for more of Hart’s turkey! Opening the menu I thought of 1957 again: as I’ve mentioned, my summer job after graduation was assisting the Laconia radio station’s copywriter; amongst other ads, I wrote the Hart’s ads and the time for writing them always seemed to occur in the late morning so at my desk I’d be studying the Hart’s menu and composing the commercial while my stomach growled with lunchtime hunger. Here at Hart’s for the second time in 2024 I chose from the menu the Sliced Turkey Sandwich because that’s what Penny and I chose the last time we had lunch together at Hart’s.

Memories, memories. We classmates reminisced but we also talked about plans for the future. I remembered the 2018 mini-reunion I’d had with four of us classmates in the month after Don died. All but one of us were widows. Then as now we touched on practical problems and support systems and throughout there was concern for each other. Love. Also lots of laughter.

And we couldn’t resist singing (softly) the LHS fight song: “Rah rah, for old Laconia, banners wave on high . . . ”
Last month when I wrote about the Golden Circle Luncheon I described my discovery of the good things in Hart’s freezer section. After this lunch we shopped there. I made the same decision I had before and bought a pound of sliced turkey.

On our way back Wanda and I stopped at Rite Aid. I was heading down an aisle toward the Lubriderm lotion on my list when I saw packages of Dove on a shelf and paused. But I still had several at home.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

AUTUMN ANXIETY

September 15, 2024        

Let’s blame it on my mother! Let’s blame my autumn anxiety on how at the first sight of a red leaf amid green on a tree or a red leaf pathetically fallen to the ground, my mother would wail, “Oh, no!” She loved summers and hated winters.

My sister and I never forgot this. We found it funny and when one of us saw a first red leaf we’d report to the other, wailing, imitating, “A red leaf! Oh, no!”

Last week I saw my first red leaf under one of our front-yard maples.

In my youth my main reason for dreading autumn was simple, the return to school, no more freedom. This continued into the years of Don’s work in high schools teaching English or running the library. Then during our caretaking years it meant closing down summer houses, raking and leaf-blowing in other people’s yards as well as our own, all the chores of preparing and bracing for winter.

I find myself bidding farewells—to long days, to birdsong, and especially to gardens; flowers and vegetables are ending or over.

 In the September section of Celia Thaxter’s Island Garden Daybook there’s a quotation from her “Already” poem:

Already the cricket is busy
     With hints of soberer days;
And the goldenrod lights slowly
     Its torch for the autumn blaze.

O brief, bright smile of summer!
     O days divine and dear!
The voices of winter’s sorrow
     Already we can hear.

I yearn for spring, my favorite season.

But my dear friend Winifred’s favorite season is autumn and her reasons do lift my spirits. Such as flannel and corduroy clothes! As she says, “I also like sweaters and fall food, stews and hearty soups, hayrides, bonfires, the smell of burning leaves, roasting potatoes in the ashes, the beautiful foliage.” She was a teacher and she adds, “I like the feeling of a new beginning mostly because of the school year, the ‘this time everything will go right’ hope. The hopeful start soon turns into the struggles of learning the new and sometimes difficult, requiring effort and concentration to get through the winter. And then spring comes with new hope and beauty and the glorious finale (and vacation) of summer.”

When my grandparents gave me A Girl’s Book of Verse, Bliss Carmen’s “April Morning” became one of my favorite springtime poems. And his “Vagabond Song” made me look forward to autumn despite the start of school—if only while reading it, caught up in the rhythm.

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood
       Touch of manner, hint of mood;
       And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
       Of bugles going by,
       And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty aster like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
       We must rise and follow her,
       When from each hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

 FROM PHILSOPHY TO POPSICLES

September 8, 2024        

For the past several months on Maine’s WCSH-TV during station breaks, amid commercials, we’ve been entertained by the “anchors” and the reporters reading letters they wrote to themselves: “A Letter to My Younger Self.” I began looking forward to the letters as these readings were repeated through the months. Some of the philosophies:

From Sharon Rose, “Stay curious. Keep asking a lot of questions . . . Never forget how to play . . . Believe forever that magic is real . . . and the world is a wondrous place.”

From Samantha York, “It’s the little things that are the big things . . . the midnight texts from Dad, the notes Mom tucked into every lunch bag, the bear hugs from your brothers . . . And as Billy Joel once said, ‘Slow down, kid, you’re doing fine.’”

From Amanda Hill, “Laugh as much as you can. The wrinkles are worth it . . . Love the people around you as hard as you can; they won’t always be there . . . It’s not always the ride you expected but it turns out to be a pretty good one. So trust the process.”

From Zach Blanchard, “Play the piano as loudly as you want.”

From Brian Yocono, “Dream big. You dreamed of an anchor job at your favorite TV station—and you work here now! . . . Being a good person is always the right choice.”

From Chris Costa, “It’s okay to slow down . . . You’ll thank your parents for teaching you to surf. It will bring joy to you for years.”

And from Lee Goldberg, “Remember the words of your father and grandfather: Be kind . . . When people tell you to be more serious, don’t do it. The world needs smiles and joy and laughter . . . AND the Red Sox and the Patriots aren’t going to stink forever. Seriously!”

Also on WCSH-TV:
On Tuesday’s “Morning Report” show I learned about Maine’s version of Punxsutawny Phil: Passy Pete, a lobster, Belfast’s “clairvoyant crustacean.” Yesterday had been the tenth year of the Passy Pete Labor Day ceremony, started by Belfast business owners to promote tourism, but somehow this was the first time I’d heard about a lobster predicting winter.

Passy Pete’s nickname is short for the (here I go trying to get the spelling right) Passagassawakeag River, which comes into Belfast Harbor. On Labor Day folks gather to see a lobster trap pulled out of the harbor by the “Belfast barons and baronesses” and then the presentation of two “prediction” scrolls to Passy Pete. On the TV screen I didn’t see exactly how Passy Pete did the choosing but it seemed that one of his claws did indeed bump one of the scrolls.

As a Belfast baron began to read that scroll aloud I realized that I was holding my breath, hoping it predicted six more weeks of summer. Alas, it said, “If you have taken care of your crops and restocked your shops, an early winter is nothing to fear.”

But on Monday on WCSH I’d learned something else, something summery: September 2nd was National Blueberry Popsicle Day. On their “Morning Report” this occasion inspired the Daily Stumper: What was the original name of the Popsicle?
Answers:

a. Drink on a Stick;
b. Frozen Novelty;
c. Epsicle;
d. Ice Pop
The show’s two anchors and the meteorologist and I guessed “d.” Nope! It was “c.”

One of the anchors, Lee Goldberg, read the history of how in 1905 eleven-year-old Frank Epperson left his soda drink with a stirring stick still in it on the porch overnight and it froze, an icicle. Eventually he began selling Epsicles.
And I remembered my first Popsicles, in the freezer chest at Walter’s Market. Ice cream cones were something our parents bought Penny and me at Weeks Dairy Bar, special treats. But she and I could walk down the street from our home to Walter’s Market and buy a Popsicle for a nickel out of our twenty-five-cents-a-week allowances. I don’t remember ever having had a blueberry Popsicle; orange is the predominant color in my memory. Blueberry sounds so summery!

In a letter to my younger self I should’ve said, “Be on the lookout for blueberry Popsicles.” Well, now my older self will be.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

CHEAT DAY EATS

September 1, 2024        

Last Wednesday when Wanda and I set forth to my latest appointment at Dartmouth-Hitchcock the sign on the Route 104 Diner in New Hampton said:
 
There’s No One Butter
Than You!

As has become our little tradition, after my appointment Wanda and I stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Enfield. This time I thought of the indulgence differently. I had a term for it: Cheat Day Eats.

Earlier I had seen Guy Fieri on the Food Network’s “Guy’s Grocery Games” announcing that the upcoming cooking game would be “Cheat Day Eats.” On Guy’s show they’ve often played “Guilty Pleasures” cooking games but I’d never heard this “Cheat Day Eats” term before. I laughed and wanted to linger but I had work to do so I shut off the TV. Later I Googled the term and learned about Jessica Hirsch and recipes and such. It occurred to me that nowadays my main cheating treats and guilty pleasures are somewhat different from what they used to be. Now it’s gluten and dairy. And as always, sweets. I splurge on real bread and cheese and chocolate.

After my discovery of Cheat Day Eats, both terms kept occurring to me. I was listening to an old audiobook of one of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels, FINGER-LICKIN’ FIFTEEN, and when Stephanie’s friend Lula demanded a bribe of  “a bucket of chicken and a Carvel ice cream cake,” I thought: Cheat Day Eats; Guilty Pleasures. Niece Thane visited, bringing magazines that included the Spring 2024 issue of THE PIONEER WOMAN magazine; when I later settled down with it I made myself a game of choosing which recipes I’d like for Cheat Day Eats/Guilty Pleasures. (I decided on Beef Stroganoff Stuffed Peppers and Pink Velvet Cupcakes).

And then I thought of the Sandwich Fair. It’ll be here on Columbus Day Weekend. Fair food! As I’ve written about before, Don and I would plan our route through the temptations in the concession stands, starting with John’s Famous French Fries. After these fries doused with malt vinegar we had to make decisions—sausage-peppers-onions sub or burrito? Cotton candy or an éclair or fudge? And something different each year, fried pickles, fried onion blossoms, funnel cakes, etc.,we sampled them all!
So now a Dunkin’ Donuts decision. When Thane visited, in addition to magazines she’d also brought me a cider-belly doughnut, which she’d got when she stopped at Moulton Farm in Meredith for veggies. Moulton’s cider-belly doughnuts are famous and utterly heavenly. I couldn’t do justice to a Dunkin’ doughnut so soon after having Moulton’s. Oh, what a dilemma!

Wanda decided on Sausage-Egg-and-Cheese in a croissant and I decided that sounded just right today. We split a little packet of hash browns.
On our way home we saw that the other side of the Route 104 Diner’s sign said:

What do you call a hamburger that sings?
“Meatloaf”

And I didn’t think about the Meat Loaf singer but about meatloaf in Guy Fieri’s “Comfort Foods” games.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

MEREDITH, NEW HAMPSHIRE

August 25, 2024

On August 15th Wanda and I went to Meredith, to Keene State College’s Golden Circle Luncheon. As I’ve described here before, these luncheons are held in various towns around the state for alumni who graduated fifty or more years ago. Don and I (Class of 1961) learned that alumni from all over the state come to the Meredith luncheon because it’s at the renowned Hart’s Turkey Farm Restaurant. A Thanksgiving buffet in August.
In the big room Wanda and I sat at a table with my friend Marilyn, who was not only a member of the Class of 1961 but also of Laconia High School’s Class of 1957. So Marilyn and I had a double reunion! Before, during, and after the turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, squash, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, and apple-crisp dessert we reminisced about Keene, about Laconia, and even about our Girl Scout trip to Washington.
Afterward as Wanda and I were leaving we lingered in the reception-room-gift-shop to gaze at the wall of refrigerators and freezers with their array of goodies, pies and pot pies and meals—and plain sliced turkey; I couldn’t resist buying a pound. Back when Hart’s had just a simple freezer chest here, Don and I would buy a turkey pie for our Thanksgivings if we didn’t want to cook a turkey.

Outdoors, I looked at the zillion summer-people cars going past into the notorious summertime traffic tie-ups at the four-way junction ahead, and as we joined them I thought about an article in the August issue of NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE. Titled “Lakefront Lure,” written by John Koziol, it began:
“Two years ago, Travel + Leisure magazine confirmed what a lot of people here already knew: Meredith is one of the ‘best small towns on the East Coast.’
“While that acclaim resulted in a surge of visitors, longtime residents say that it also fanned a hot real estate market that is centered on Lake Winnipesaukee and is based on the town’s current major industry: retirement. . .

“The 40-square-mile town includes more than 14 miles of inland water area, with Lake Winnipesaukee comprising the largest share of waterfront. It also includes Lake Waukewan and Lake Wicwas, as well as parts of Lake Winnisquam and Pemigewasset Lake.”
Wanda and I were nearing the four-way junction where I remembered the last of the old industries, a relatively new 1950s asbestos plant. Koziol wrote, “Gradually, awareness of the problems created by asbestos grew” and the “plant closed in 1979.”
In our childhood my sister and I knew Meredith as the place we drove through on our way to The Lot on Moultonborough Neck or to our Grandmother Nana’s house in Orford. Koziol wrote, “Because it’s between Laconia, the seat of Belknap County, and Plymouth, home to Plymouth State University, Meredith has long been a bedroom community for those two municipalities.

“Since the early 20th century, Meredith has billed itself as ‘The Latchkey to the White Mountains’ because it was in the middle of the roads to get to and back from the mountains.” And Wanda and I were at the junction, where Penny and I in the backseat of our parents’ car would look up, awed, at the huge latchkey hanging above Route 3 straight ahead, announcing “LATCHKEY TO THE WHITE MOUNTAINS” as the route headed north.

If you turn left here onto the main street, you’ll come to a tribute to the late Bob Montana (who’d lived in Meredith) and his Archie Comics, which I wrote a post about in May 2019.  Koziol: “A sculpture of the freckled Archie Andrews was recently placed on a bench in a pocket park downtown.”
Wanda and I turned right onto Route 25, going home to Sandwich. 

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

1920s Fashions

August 18 , 2024

Recently Betsy and Tacy have had me marveling in a horrified way about how we women have been tortured by fashion.

Jennifer Davis-Kay’s July issue of her wonderful Betsy-Tacy E-News is titled “The Agony Column,” and in it there is a report from a heroic woman, Rebecca Karstad: “My ‘Day’ in a Corset.” She bravely lasted “approximately four hours” wearing one “as an experiment for this newsletter.” Agony!

In February 2022 I wrote here about underwear: “ . . . in my youthful reading, descriptions of women’s fashions of the past made me feel very lucky; pretty petticoats were nice, but corsets? My mother wore a girdle with garters but not a corset! No wonder women in books were always fainting! I REALLY realized this when reading GONE WITH THE WIND’s scene in which Scarlett, wearing ‘lace pantalets, linen corset cover and three billowing lace and linen petticoats,’ grips a bedpost while her corset is pulled tighter and tighter into a seventeen-inch ‘whalebone-girdled waist.’ A thousand eeks!”
My sister and I joked that Ernie, our mother, would drive home from her work as a law-firm secretary and start taking off her girdle in the driveway. Not quite, but almost. Years later I felt the same about Spanx.

In the Spring 2024 issue of the Betsy-Tacy DEEP VALLEY SUN newsletter there is a fascinating history of another form of torture: “Chasing the Hobble Skirt Vote” by John Patrick Sheehy. I’d forgotten about (or repressed) the hobble-skirts era. Sheehy explained that Paul Poiret, a Paris designer, got the idea from Wilbur Wright and his biplane. Confronted with the problem of an actress-passenger’s large skirt, Wright tied a rope around it at ankle-length.

In his last paragraph Sheehy reminded readers that in the 1950s women got another version of the hobble skirt, Christian Dior’s “pencil skirt.” Back then we called these skirts “straight skirts.” They did hobble us. I much preferred the good old “full skirts” and “circle skirts,” and if I bought a straight skirt I looked for one with a “kick pleat” at the back for a little relief from restraint.

I’ve always felt sorry about men’s having to wear neckties strangling them. Also, they are stuck within the boring confines of a suit. My dear friend Sandy has sent me a very entertaining clipping about men’s clothes and how to enliven them, “Pick Your Style Lane” by Ashley Ogawa Clarke: “Do you have a signature look, guys? If not, you could be missing a trick that makes shopping easier—and leads to better outfits. Consider these four sartorial paths.” They are “Classic with a Twist,” “Silently Stylish,” “Leading Man Energy,” and “Charmingly Rugged.”

Laughing, reading the descriptions, I tried to decide which style was Don’s. But I couldn’t settle on one; there had to be two. For formal occasions it would be “Classic with a Twist,” which to Don usually meant a trip to George’s Apparel, a men’s clothing store in Manchester, NH. For informal and everyday wear, i.e., most of Don’s wardrobe, I decided on “Charmingly Rugged,” which to Don meant L.L.Bean!

But in the late 1960s and early 1970s a new casual men’s style got our attention on TV, in magazines and downtown stores. To my astonishment Don agreed when I suggested he buy a dashiki. The shirt he chose was gorgeously patterned in gold and brown and of course he was gorgeous in it.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

OLD HOME WEEK 2024

August 11, 2024

Today, Sunday, is the last day of Sandwich’s 126th Old Home Week.

As I’ve mentioned, the favorite event for Don and me over the years was the Friends of the Library book sale. The Friends’ requests on the Sandwich Board for book donations usually galvanized us into doing some weeding of our bookshelves. Then at the sale we did Christmas shopping for ourselves as well as for gifts. This year there have also been the Friends’ usual posts seeking volunteers to help lug and set up the books in the Smith Building on the fairground, but last Sunday I was dismayed to read:

“The Friends of the Library arrived at the Smith Building this afternoon to find it flooded. A lot of our stock is damaged. We are salvaging what we can. We could use some help today and tomorrow. Saving as much as possible for the sale on Tuesday. Any help is appreciated. We will be here till at least 4 and starting at 8 A.M. tomorrow. Thank you.”
There had been thunderstorms with downpours. As I wished that Don and I could help with the salvage operation, I remembered various treasures I’d found at the book sales. I was able to smile recalling Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s BODY LINE, which I wrote about here in August 2016: “This is one of the books in her Bill Slider Mystery series. [I’ve read it and] I grabbed it because even if I don’t get around to rereading the text I can have fun rereading her chapter titles, which are clever and often hilarious (and sometimes too British for me to grasp). BODY LINE’s first chapter is ‘The Wrath of Grapes.’ Then there’s ‘Witless for the Prosecution,’ ‘They Tuck You Up, Your Mom and Dad’ (a salute to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse,’) ‘Route of All Evil,’ and so forth.”
On the Monday Sandwich Board there was this post: “Hi everyone. The Friends of the Library Book Sale starts tomorrow as scheduled. We still have lots of wonderful books for sale. We are accepting donations of books. Please bring them to the library or the book sale.”

Relief, admiration. And sadness for sodden books. In the Old Home Week program the book sale, held on Tuesday and Wednesday, was described: “Superb selection of books for children, young adults, adults; cookbooks, travel, fiction, mystery, nonfiction, biographies. Funds raised support community programs at the S. H. Wentworth Library.”
  With the Olympics on TV, I read in the Old Home Week program about the sports taking place here:

Saturday August 3: Pickle Ball Tournament. Random draw for partners. Tennis Courts.
Sunday, August 4: Adult Pick-up Soccer. Quimby Field.
     Horseshoes. Sandwich residents and guests. Quimby Field.
Monday, August 5. Fishing Derby. 12 and younger. Prizes. Cookies and lemonade. Littles Pond, Little Pond Road.
Wednesday, August 7. 93rd Annual Youth Softball Game. Ages 9-15 (co-ed). Quimby Field.
     Sports Day. Races, tug-o-war, pie-eating contest, and more! All ages. Quimby Field.
Friday, August 9. Water Sports Day with beach staff. Town Beach, 533 Squam Lake Road.
     Family Fun Triathlon: Swim, Bike, Run. Town Beach.
Saturday, August 10. 49th Annual Bob Biddle Tennis Tournament Finals, Quimby Tennis Courts.
Sunday, August 11. Adult Pick-up Soccer. Quimby Field.

And always on the last Sunday there’s the “Sandwich Historical Society’s Annual Excursion and Picnic. Bring lunch and a chair; dessert and drinks provided.” Last year I wrote about how Don and I remembered fondly an excursion in a school bus trundling along the old dirt road in Sandwich Notch, where we all picnicked at a lone house remaining from a bygone neighborhood.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

HONOR SYSTEM

August 4, 2024

When Wanda and I were doing errands last week, we stopped at Chestnut Meadow, a Sandwich organic farm with a farm stand. Tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini—and eggs from the hen house beside the stand. Talk about fresh! You pay by the honor system, putting your money through a slot in the metal box attached to the stand’s wall.
I thought of an article in the August issue of DOWN EAST magazine: “Humble Pie: At a quarter-century-old honor-system pie shop, trust is baked in.” Chelsea Diehl wrote, “Twenty-five years ago, Mary Jo Kelly set some fruit pies with handwritten price tags on a table at the end of her driveway, on Route 26 in Newry, and screwed a metal cash box into a nearby tree. Soon, hikers returning from Grafton Notch State Park, six miles up the road, had cleaned her out—and paid in full for their purchases. So Kelly continued to offer goodies on the honor system.”
Eventually she built “a four-by-eight-foot wooden shed. An old, concrete–filled, cast-iron air tank with a slit cut in the top became the cash box. In 2006 Kelly expanded again, installing a kitchen in a shingled building outfitted with three ovens . . . 
“Today, Kelly’s son, Ryan Wheeler, and his wife, Devon, who took over Puzzle Mountain Bakery in 2010, bake in the roadside kitchen from Memorial Day through November, filling the unmanned stand with some 3,000 pies in 20 different flavors each season . . .
“Theft can be a problem. A couple of times, kids cleaned out the entire shed. The most persistent pie pilferers, however, have been bears. ‘Their favorite flavor is blueberry, just like everyone else,’ says Ryan.
“All in all, though, the honor system has kept people pretty honest.”
Following this article there’s an “Honor Roll” description of “Four more help-yourself bakeshops [in Maine] that merit a slice of your time.”
As I continued on through the magazine, I stopped of course at an article about ice cream. This issue of DOWN EAST is its 70th anniversary issue; Editor in Chief Will Grunewald wrote, “Since DOWN EAST is turning 70 years old this month, we had the idea that maybe we’d shout out precisely that many different Maine ice creams, all in one fell swoop (or scoop, perhaps).” In the midst of these delicious pages I suddenly saw in boldface: “Awful-Awful”!!!
 I read, “Up north, Houlton Farms Dairy runs a trio of stands, in Houlton, Caribou, and Presque Isle, that serve up the Awful-Awful, an extra—or ‘awfully’—thick frappe.”
And I was back in Laconia’s Weeks Dairy Bar taking a fearful sip of my third Awful-Awful after having drunk two. If I could drink three in a row, I’d get my name on a plaque, the challenge I gave Snowy in THE CHEERLEADER, in fictional Hooper’s Dairy Bar. And then:
“Snowy, who had brought her hope like a flower to the dance after the last basketball game, vomited in the ladies’ room of Hooper’s Dairy Bar, vomited and vomited until she was weeping . . .
“She looked at herself in the mirror and, exhausted, wondered how she was going to walk out there and say she was disqualified.
“She leaned against the wall, her hot face against the cold tiles. The idea of cheating dawned.
“She had never cheated, except when it was acceptable, such as checking homework or consulting kids who’d earlier had a test she was about to take.”
Is there an Awful-Awfuls honor system? Was vomiting really cheating? Well, Snowy and I went back to the waiting third Awful-Awful, did not confess what had happened in the rest room, and finished it.
Later that month on Snowy and Tom’s first date, after the movies:
“When Snowy and Tom walked into Hooper’s, into the noise of the kids and the smell of milk and grease, Tom said, ‘This I’ve got to see,’ and stopped in front of the plaque on the wall . . .
“Snowy looked at it, shocked. She hadn’t earned it, but there it was, and every time she came here she would see it.”

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

A LOST LUNCH BOX AND A FOUND PRY BAR, ETC.

July 28, 2024

Here are some recent postings on the Sandwich Board, lost and found items predominating:

July 15. Do You Have a Horse? A friend of mine is being visited by two Afghan teens she helps. When asked what they wanted to do during their visit, they said they wanted to see a horse. Not necessarily to ride, but to see and pet one. Anyone in town interested in fulfilling this particular dream? They could come this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Thank you for considering this.

July 16. Lunch Box: Are you missing a lunch box? Maybe fell off your car? One was turned in to Sandwich Police Department on Monday. Call or come by if it’s yours. [This reminded me of the morning I got a phone call from Don, high-school librarian at work. He said sheepishly, “I think I put my lunch bag on the car roof while I was putting other stuff in the car. I forgot it. So maybe it’s in the driveway. I’ll buy my lunch today.” We started laughing. Then I checked the driveway—and thus had his sandwich for my lunch.]

July 17. Lost Cardigan: I lost my favorite lightweight cardigan last Saturday evening in the area of Foothills [village center café]/Church ice cream social. If anyone found it, please contact me.

July 21. Found Pry Bar: We found this heavy metal pry bar on the side of Mt. Israel Road; it’s about 4.5 feet long. We think it probably fell off a truck as the vehicle rounded a curve. If it’s your pry bar, give me a call and I will let you know where to find it. [Photograph of pry bar]
This mention of Mt. Israel Road reminded me of the first time I climbed Mount Israel. The 2,630-foot mountain is in my father’s 50 MORE HIKES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE and when I took over updating Dan’s hiking books Penny and I did the hike together. Dan made the hike, as he wrote, “a memorable loop hike that includes part of the ancient Sandwich Notch Road.” Penny and I parked at the Mead Base Conservation Center trailhead. A vertical rise of 1,780 feet took us up to the summit, “a rectangular rock extending above the spruces and firs. The opening . . . reveals Sandwich Mountain and also the whole range to the east: Mount Whiteface, Tripyramid, Passaconaway, Paugus, and Chocorua’s rock-faced pinnacle framed by spruces. An unofficial side trail along the ledges leads to lake views.”
Penny and I descended to the Sandwich Notch Road: “The dirt road ascends a long hill. Chopped from the forested notch about 1800, the road became a thoroughfare for the people of remote northern settlements. Those pioneers needed markets and products available only in towns settled earlier to the south and even as far as the coast and Portsmouth. By 1850 well-established families occupied the notch along the road’s eight miles. They logged and operated farms, sawmills, taverns, a whiskey still, and schoolhouses. Now all that remains are a cemetery and cellar holes beside the road.” Penny and I walked along through history back to the car.

July 24. Lost Prescription Sunglasses. If anyone spots a pair of sunglasses (prescription) around town, please give me a shout. Sadly, I’m having a heck of a time retracing my steps. Possibly the North Sandwich store, the beach (doubtful), or Foothills.
July 24. Lost Prescription Sunglasses FOUND! Thanks to all who responded, to the Sandwich Board in general, and to Stephanie at Chestnut Meadow [farmstand] in particular.

July 23. Thoreau Comes to Sandwich. [Allan DiBiase posts daily from Thoreau’s JOURNAL, illustrating with photographs; Allan’s photo this day was of clouds over a Sandwich view of mountains.] July 23, 1851 in Thoreau’s JOURNAL. “The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds that pass over the earth. Pay not too much heed to them. Let not the traveller stop for them. They consist with the fairest weather. By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instant that the shadow of a cloud was passing over [the] spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was. I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without.”

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

PICNICS

July 21 , 2024

Last Thursday in Center Harbor after Wanda and I did our grocery-shopping she drove over to the town dock on Lake Winnipesaukee and we had what Don and I always called a “car picnic.” The supermarket had been very busy with summer folks—especially the hilarious sight of two young husbands pushing two shopping carts; one cart was filled sky-high with groceries and the other was brimming with four lively little boys. A woman asked the husbands, “How did your wives get you to do the shopping AND take the kids?”
The town-dock town-beach area was quieter. Snacking in the car, Wanda and I sat and soaked up summer, the lake breeze cooling us. We watched two “party boats” being put in at the dock. We overheard a group of women comparing notes about local hotels. In the harbor several speedboats and one sailboat were moored. There were only a few people on the small beach but the lifeguard was reassuringly on duty.
I remembered how in the winter Don and I used to stop here after errands and have our car picnics watching ice fishing. And naturally we took summer drives on Sandwich’s back roads. To avoid blackflies we’d picnic in the car beside a brook or near a covered bridge or just plain amid the roadside woods.
In the Early Summer 2024 issue of the Vermont Country Store’s catalogue the essay inside the front page was about “Summer Picnics with Mildred.” The proprietors, Gardner, Cabot, Eliot, and Lyman Orton, reminisced:

“Our grandmother, Mildred, was a genuine picnic enthusiast. On summer drives, along Vermont’s unpaved roads, she would often plan to stop by a field for lunch. Out came the plaid blanket and wicker basket. For lunch: chicken sandwiches with lettuce and butter on home-baked wheat bread, a slab of Vermont cheddar cheese, common crackers, pickled fiddleheads, oatmeal cookies, and a thermos of Wilcox’s milk.

“We still have Mildred’s picnic basket and thermos, keepsakes of a happy time when our father and uncle were boys, still in use by the time we brothers were old enough to picnic and our grandparents made a two-hour drive to Rutland seem as exotic and perilous as a safari to Rangoon. The highlight was always wholesome food in the tall grass of a Vermont hay meadow, somewhere along Route 100.”

Penny and I always remembered how Ernie, our mother, loved picnics. An escape from cooking another damn meal in the kitchen! I’ve written here about The Lot, that little piece of woods our parents had for several years on the Moultonborough Neck section of Lake Winnipesaukee, and the picnics she made for our lunches there and the cookouts Dan, our father, did when we camped there overnight.

For a beach, Ernie took Penny and me and the picnic basket to a lakefront house in Gilford called Beachwood, whose owner charged twenty-five cents a car to park in the big yard. Her sandwiches were as easy as possible: peanut-butter-and-jelly; deviled ham; cut-up leftover roast beef doused with Worcestershire sauce on Sunbeam Bread spread with mayonnaise.

Earlier this month on the Food Network I happened upon the “Guy’s Grocery Games” show, this one called “Guy’s Summer Games.” The three teams of two chefs were told by Guy Fieri to make the “Perfect Picnic Plate,” which had to consist of “a protein, two side dishes, and something whimsical.” To my surprise, all three teams made fried chicken, but their seasonings did vary. Then there were pasta salads and coleslaw and salsa; most whimsical to me was one team’s strawberries-and-mozzarella pudding-cup salad. The team with the Creole-seasoned fried chicken won.

And I remembered Ernie slapping together some quick sandwiches and taking us to Beachwood.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

AUNT PLEASANTINE

July 14, 2024

Thank you, Diane, for suggesting I share how the character of Aunt Pleasantine came to be.

My 1978 novel AUNT PLEASANTINE was inspired by my Aunt Dot who, like Aunt Pleasantine, wasn’t really an aunt.  Aunt Dot was my Grandmother Ruth’s dear friend, just as Aunt Pleasantine was narrator Mary’s grandmother’s close friend. Her background was much the same as Aunt Pleasantine’s, a comfortable childhood, an unfaithful husband, a divorce when divorces were rare; then financial hardship.

Aunt Dot had always been in my life. She helped take care of Penny and me on the chicken farm right from when we were born. When we visited our grandparents in Lexington she was usually part of the visit. She visited us in New Hampshire. Penny and I enjoyed her visits, her humorous outlook. I also enjoyed the little coconut cakes she always brought from a bakery for our father!

She corresponded with our mother, and later in life she began writing to me too. In one of her letters she sent a photograph of her young self. This is what galvanized me into the idea of a novel. Don framed the photo and arranged it on a living-room wall, and I wrote Aunt Dot’s description into the description Aunt Pleasantine writes to Mary:

“[The picture] must have been taken about 1909, because it was before I was married and that momentous event occurred in 1910.
The picture was taken during a drive. We stopped and got out of the automobile to have our picture taken by your grandmother’s brother.
From left to right:
Your grandmother is wearing a blue and white checkered taffeta dress. Her bonnet is blue, with white ties.
Next, my father, whom I adored, in his auto cap and duster, the latter oil-spotted because he always rode in the front seat.
Next, my poor grandmother, whose life I made miserable . . . Grandma is wearing a blue and green silk foulard dress with a light straw bonnet.
The coy one is, of course, me. My bonnet was black with bunches of violets, supposed to add greatly to my appearance, when the ribbon ties held them securely over my ears.
In the background there is a Rah-Ray boy. And a ‘smoothie’ who is smoking a ‘seegar.’ They were your grandmother’s and my beaux, but I can’t remember their names.
We ladies must have left our dusters in the car. We always had to wear them because the roads were all dirt then.”

On another living-room wall there is another photo of Aunt Dot, one I inherited from my parents’ house. It’s a formal studio portrait of a lovely young mother seated with her daughter and two sons. Even if I’m hurrying across the room, it always gives me pause. One of her sons died in World War II in an Allied operation that’s known as “A Bridge Too Far.”

The name “Pleasantine” comes from the other side of my family, my father’s side. His grandmother was named Pleasantine; she named one of her daughters Pleasantine and the name continued into the next generations. One of my father’s sisters was a Pleasantine. My mother didn’t particularly like this sister-in-law—and that’s probably the reason why neither Penny nor I became a Pleasantine!

While writing the novel I told Aunt Dot that she had inspired it. This tickled her.

Alas, she died before she could read it.

I was in my late thirties when I decided to have a heroine who was eighty-four. I feared the leap of imagination I’d need to do it, but Aunt Dot’s voice was in my head and I proceeded. Now here I am a year older than she was and I’m dumbfounded and highly amused by my daring to imagine old age.

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved. 

BEST OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

July 7, 2024

Last Sunday my post was about PUBLISHERS WEEKLY’S best Fall 2024 books. Now the July issue of NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE has arrived and it’s the issue with the “results of the annual Best of New Hampshire poll and the Editors’ picks.”

In years past we “advisers” to the magazine were asked to send suggestions. My favorite of my suggestions was “Elephant Head: Best Little Hike to a Great Big View.” In 2020 I wrote here about the Elephant Head, a “sight in the White Mountains that’s astonishing, magnificent, and funny. Out from a wooded mountainside in Crawford Notch a cliff protrudes in the shape of a gigantic elephant head, complete with wrinkly eyes.” When you hike up to stand on the head you see the great big view. The Elephant Head was given a spectacular full-page photo in that 2020 “Best of” issue.

With this 2024 issue, as usual I had fun reading the “Best” lists, revisiting places in my memory. In the Food & Drink section there were, amongst the Readers’ Picks, a bakery in Wolfeboro called the Yum-Yum Shop (that name!); Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill (where in 1962 Don and I celebrated our fifth anniversary when we were living nearby in Lisbon); Patrick’s Pub in Gilford (near Sawyer’s Dairy Bar where Sally and I waitressed the summer of 1955); and George’s Diner in Meredith (Don and I often went for lunch and sometimes Thursday evenings for the New England Boiled Dinner Special).

The “Shops & Services” section included the place I remember as Landau’s Department Store, which opened when I was in fifth or sixth grade. It shocked my friends and me: competition for Woolworth’s across the street! We soon became well-acquainted with it, a more elegant store with a (new word!) mezzanine. The summer of 1957 when I was working nearby at the WLNH radio station writing copy for commercials, I usually brought my lunch but sometimes I splurged and walked up the street to Landau’s and at the sofa-fountain lunch counter had a grilled cheese and a ginger ale. Bliss!

It is no longer Landau’s. In these picks it’s described thus: “Hard-to-Find Antiques. A place with 22,000 square feet of antiques AND a working model train set? New Hampshire’s largest antique store really does have it all. You never know exactly what you’re going to find at the Laconia Antique Center. With more than 150 dealers, the Antique Center has unique and hard-to-find antiques and collectibles that include railroad memorabilia, vintage fishing and hunting equipment, postcards, furniture, silver, ephemera, and so much more.”

Don and I have walked past the Antique Center, have paused and gazed in the windows, but we never dared go in for fear we’d see vintage items we could not resist. Hell, we ourselves were vintage enough!
When I turned to the magazine’s monthly “Calendar” section I glanced at the list of fairs and festivals and stopped, riveted by the name of the fair and by the location. Laconia!

“July 27. 13th Annual Summer Psychic and Craft Fair. Come enjoy a fun-filled day with the whole family. Inside with the cool AC, get a reading from one of the many talented psychics, experience the wonder of Aura Photography and shop from lots of gorgeous hand-crafted items. Then make your way to the parking lot where many more vendors and artisans will be peddling their amazing offerings. Free. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Weirs Community Center, 25 Lucerne Ave., Laconia.”

Wow! How had this fair been going on in Laconia and I’d missed mentions of it? Now I time-traveled back to 1998 when Penny and I spent three days in Sedona, Arizona. We didn’t have our auras photographed but I did have a reading and we took a Vortex Tour. Some years later I gave this Sedona trip to Bev in THE HUSBAND BENCH.

Happy July Fourth weekend, everyone!

© 2024 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.  

 

 

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