Y2K

December 19, 1999

       Dick Francis has pointed out that "What if?" is the beginning of fiction. It is also the beginning of a train of thought that flashes into motion whenever a new year approaches, and when there is also a new millennium ahead and the view from the caboose is lengthier than that from the engine (to strain the metaphor), this "what if?" can crash you into a wreck of regrets.

Dan, my father, used to quote Edwin Arlington Robinson's "futile as regret." Dan enjoyed Aldous Huxley's admonition to avoid "memory carrying an emotional charge," though of course that's almost impossible to do. In the quotes department, I try to follow Elizabeth's advice to Darcy in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: "You must learn something of my philosophy. -- Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure." And I recall the exchange in Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin's correspondence when Larkin lamented that all his memories were unhappy and she wrote back that "I find as I get older that I tend to steer clear of any kind of memories or push them away, unless I want to call them up for any special reason."

Well, in this season of memories and assessments, what to do? Practice living-in-the-moment, mindfulness, and let it go at that?

Yesterday in the Christmas rush at the Mall of New Hampshire, during my busy book signing of the hiking books at Eastern Mountain Sports, talking with shoppers who'd stopped amid the frenzy to ask about hikes or to tell me about a favorite mountain, their tension momentarily easing away as we discussed forests and trails, I suddenly thought of another quote. I've been relishing Miss Read's THRUSH GREEN, and I remembered how the doctor's wife reflects that "It had taken her almost all her life to realize, consciously, how much the country sights and scents around her had contributed to her inner happiness and had provided zest and comfort in turn."

It came to me that my "what-if"s" almost all would have meant living and working in a city, where eventually I'd have been miserable. Because my father had early on realized consciously how much living in the country meant to him and had decided to do so, I grew up aware of the choice and after sampling city life as an adult I decided too that I needed woods and would make the compromises necessary.

So now, postponing the natural human inclination to look behind and ahead, I look instead at the dazzling glitter of iced branches out my desk window and wish you HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

© 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.

 

FIFTIES DINER

September 25, 1999 

 

". . . the music's not immortal, but the world
has made it sweet . . . "

               In his last years my father wrote an essay that included a description of what it felt like to watch a TV rerun at a movie he'd seen in his younger years (IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT). He told how his emotions summoned up from his memory a line from Alfred Noyes's poem "The Barrel-Organ": " . . . the music's not immortal, but the world has made it sweet . . ."  

              This afternoon Don and I went to a fifth birthday bash for Bobby's Girl, a Fifties diner nearby. The parking lot was jammed with the cars of our youth, looking newer than they had then but sporting "Antique"--license plates, and we marveled at the sheer size and weight of these vehicles we'd learned to drive in. As one of the car doors was slammed shut, Don exclaimed, "Listen to that! It sounds like a vault!"
              Over the parking lot drifted the smell of hamburgers on the outdoor grill, selling for an old-fashioned price, fifty cents. There was also an old-fashioned smell of cigarettes. People queued up for the food, people wandered around admiring the cars; middle-aged folks mostly, some older, some younger. The waitresses were wearing purple full skirts, mid-calf length. Their costumes were disconcertingly just that, costumes; I was tempted to help with some more authentic touches, to suggest crinolines and tell them to turn up the collars of their white blouses. I saw one woman wearing a poodle skirt.
              But it was the music that overwhelmed me. The first song I heard as I stepped onto the parking lot was the first song Snowy and Tom made out to in The Cheerleader, "Unchained Melody." There I was on a sunny afternoon surrounded by vintage cars, listening to two old guys (probably my age) in baseball caps playing electric guitars and singing, "Oh, my love, my darling/I've hungered for your touch/A long lonely time . . ."

Then they moved on to Buddy Holly, and senior citizens began jitterbugging.

© 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved.

 

Glorious Garlic

August 15, 1999

I never had any luck growing garlic until a few years ago when we met one of Don's former students, Andrea Craxton, and her husband, David, who live on an organic farm in northern New Hampshire. David, we learned, is known as the Garlic King.

Aha, I thought, and begged -for advice. Andrea gave me a copy of an article she'd written for The Northern Beaconabout the King's garlic-growing methods. Adapting them to my smaller garden, I at last found success, which still strikes me as unbelievable.

Every Columbus Day I plant rows of garlic cloves, fretting that the little nuggets won't survive the winter. I spread some hay over them, and soon enough there's snow on top. Throughout the winter I gaze out the window beside my desk, seeing snowdrifts across the garden and shivering for those cloves. But early in the spring, as the snow melts down to the layer of frosty hay, green shoots valiantly stab upward. Hooray!

That feeling of triumph never really lessens during the summer while I weed and water and the stalks grow. Those rows of garlic are the most satisfying sight in the whole garden. Along about mid-July, stalks start to curl, forming a small bulb, a bulbil, which I cut off so the main bulbs' energy won't be sapped. A couple of weeks later, the stalks begin to turn brown.

Around the second week in August, I carefully dig up the garlic, shake off as much dirt as possible from the damp bulbs, and lug basketloads up to my office (a garret) where I spread them out on newspapers on the floor to dry.

That's where they are right now, and the aroma is heady as I write.

When they are dry, I'll brush off the remaining dirt, cut off the stalks (this hard-stemmed variety can't be braided), and put the harvest in mesh bags for storage. But I'll set aside the best of the bulbs to replant on Columbus Day, once again doubting their survival.

Copyright 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved  
-----

 

The Celebrated Jumping Chipmunk 

July 1, 1999

The largest sight out our kitchen window recently was a mother bear, foraging in our backyard while her two cubs waited up a nearby tree.

A smaller sight occurred this morning. I glanced out and glimpsed white, the white tummy of a chipmunk who was stretching upward in the grass to study a low overhanging branch of a raspberry bush. Then up the chipmunk leapt, grabbing the branch and pulling it down to dine on berries. I've never seen such a stunt in all my years of chipmunk-watching. I put aside my bagel and waited. Was this how great discoveries were made, amongst chipmunks as well as humans? The chipmunk had figured out how to have its raspberries without the prickles it would have encountered if it climbed the bush. But could it retain the reasoning? Yes, indeed, inspired by success the chipmunk repeated the maneuver, bounding and bouncing up to grab the branch again and again until all the ripe berries were devoured.

Copyright 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved  

Going Up Brook 

May 17, 1999

It's become a rite of spring, getting the pipe in the brook functioning. When we moved here in 1976, I was horrified at the sight of pipes sullying the clear beauty of the brook that runs along our boundary up steeply into the woods behind our house, although I appreciated their history. Brass pipes had long ago supplied our neighborhood farms and houses with gravity-fed water; after a particularly energetic spring freshet had bashed them, they had been replaced with black plastic pipes. In the typical fashion of leaving old farm machinery to rust in barnyards, the brass pipes were left in the brook, and over the years any replaced pieces of the plastic pipes were junked along the banks.

As drilled wells replaced dug wells, our neighbors mostly stopped using the pipes. When we bought this house we had a well drilled (Did we ever! The experience is chronicled in A Lovely Time Was Had By All), so we assumed that the pipe for this property would be a part of the past, too.

Then I planted the new vegetable garden and Don mused, "If there's enough pressure, it could run a sprinkler."

There was. I did not have to lug water all summer.

So every spring now we set forth early some morning carrying a bag loaded with tools and fly dope, walking up the brook to discover what winter storms, spring flooding, and beaver dams have done to our pipe. The woods are sunlit yellow-green, birds are singing, water is splashing over rocks, Indian poke and trilliums have popped out of the forest duff.

And there's Don in Wellingtons, balanced on stones in the middle of the brook, fixing a break in the pipe while like a surgical nurse I hand him implements: the propane torch, a hacksaw, duct tape. His work involves a lot of contented swearing.

Up we continue to the top of the waterfall, where the pipe starts, held down in a moss-ringed pool by rocks. Don clears the sieve. He opens a faucet to release air. We walk back down, looking and listening for any leaks we've missed.

Some years the weather has tossed the pipe like spaghetti. Beavers have created a new pond, burying it. Don fixes and tinkers. Each year when we get back down to our yard we hold our breath as Don turns on the faucet beside the garden. Sometimes nothing happens; back up the brook we go. This year was one of the lucky times, and water gushed forth. Success! Don hooked up the sprinkler.

Robert Frost's poem about going out to clean the pasture spring can be considered a love poem. So is going up the brook.

Copyright 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved  

 

Mud Season 

April 2, 1999

 

Winter is at last unlocking. The snow is melting fast and brooks are rushing, and everything is making a racket, from the red-winged blackbirds clattering in the treetops to the pickups churning through mud-rutted roads in four-wheel-drive. Chipmunks have emerged, peeking out of stone walls, basking on the woodpile, using our lilac bush as a jungle gym. Early yesterday morning I heard a barking sound in the sky and saw a great flock of geese overhead; two of their V formations blended into a giant M, while a straight line flew into the center of another V, becoming an arrow, aimed north.

© 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall
All Rights Reserved

 

BRR! 

January 15, 1999

 

Do we all have a personal thermometer that announces: THIS IS TOO DAMN COLD? Here in New Hampshire, I seem to have concluded over the years that at eighteen degrees I will not go out just to play in the snow. I certainly go outdoors at temperatures far below that for necessary errands, trips, work, but not for pleasure.

Do we all also have one cold memory that sticks icily in the mind? Ernie, my mother, always recalled my second birthday, which she and I spent in bed to keep warm in the Belmont, New Hampshire, farmhouse, reading stories. My sister, Penny, who has begun escaping to Arizona come winter, recently reminisced about the winter of '69 when the electricity was off for three days at her house in North Conway, New Hampshire; Dan, our father, stopped by and found her and her four-year-old daughter in bed with their coats on.

I suppose I should put the Ice Storm of '98 at the top of my list, when our power was off for four days. But the time that's become a legend for Don and me happened in 1963, when we were living in Lisbon in the northern part of New Hampshire. One evening Don's father in Laconia phoned to ask if we were okay; he'd heard it was forty below up there. Taken aback by this concern, Don replied we were fine, explaining that the only problem was that although the heat rod in our Jeep had allowed the engine to turn over when he started it up that morning to drive to school, the Jeep wouldn't move because it had frozen to the barn floor. So Don bundled up with more layers and walked to school.

© 1999 by Ruth Doan MacDougall
All Rights Reserved

1998

VACATION IN MAINE

October 24, 1998

 

Next time I go on vacation, I'm bringing along a poetry anthology.

It's been a busy summer of book signings and interviews, not easy for a shy person--as Garrison Keillor would say, so when I sat on rocks on the Maine Island to which we retreat in September, I watched the sea and felt knots of tension ease and resolved that when I returned home and life got frantic again, I would remember this scene and be nourished.

Then into my head came a fragment of Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," and I began to go crazy because I couldn't remember a few words exactly. I could remember other lines, especially those from which had come the original title of The Lilting House:

          . . . little, nameless, unremembered acts
               Of Kindness and of Love 

and the title of an early unpublished short novel, And So I Dare to Hope. But the precise wording of the lines I wanted remained elusive, and there was no anthology in our cottage.

At home, I reread the poem. Ah, the beautiful words and cadence! I had last reread it eight years ago, after my sister and I drove up the Wye Valley, past a steep cliff-face of rocks, and suddenly there appeared Tintern Abbey soaring up gray and roofless. I highly recommend rereading it at different stages of one's life.

While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.

-----
Copyright 1998 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved  

 Trip to Lancaster

and Lisbon, New Hampshire 

October 4, 1998

Yesterday we made our yearly trip north to Lancaster, NH, to buy apples and cider at the Lost Nation Orchard & Cider Mill, where the "pressman" is the husband of one of Don's former students. It's always a beautiful drive, into foliage becoming muted while ours is still brightening, up through Franconia Notch's hovering mountains to farmland opening green to the Connecticut River valley, along a winding back road to the cider mill banked with pumpkins.

After we'd loaded up the car, we headed home via a sentimental journey to Lisbon, NH, where we lived from 1962 to 1964 and Don taught English at the high school. It's the inspiration for Tom's town of Newburgh in Snowy, and I suppose I've used aspects of it in other books. We've driven through a few times since those days. This time we saw that the old high school has been replaced by a new one (though they saved the old cupola to use as a sort of gazebo), but the house we rented on Dickinson Street, where I wrote The Lilting House, is still there, even the barn; the little twigs of trees that had been planted out front are now a towering screen. More than ever I found the layers of memories, the confusions of reality and fiction, almost unbearable, as is that eerie awareness of how you haven't ever really changed, in essence.

Copyright 1998 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved  

Overnight Hike to Gordon Pond 

August 9, 1998

 

("Overnight Hike to Gordon Pond" is Hike 46 in 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire)

"A moss-covered credenza!" said Amy, my backpacking companion and a friend-since-childhood of my niece.

"Huh?" I said.

"Doctor Seuss," she explained.

We were passing a boulder draped in emerald-green moss, and this became a repeated sight that now remains as an image for this hike, the greens of the moss on boulders and ledges along the trail and then the greens of the lily pads on Gordon Pond, with sunlight and floating yellow blooms.

Despite its proximity to the Appalachian Trail, we had the pond to ourselves. We chose a well-used campsite under spruces. Amy always brings along a clothesline, and we changed out of our sweaty hiking clothes and hung them up to air. She also always brings a red-checked plastic tablecloth to spread on the ground; it's mended with black duct tape.

Because I grew up cooking on campfires, I'm still amazed at what Amy produces from her little backpacking stove. Supper was steamed veg with sauteed tofu over rice noodles on a bed of fresh chard, served up with a spicy peanut sauce! We took our dessert, chocolate puddings, down to the shore and sat and watched swallows swooping around.

As usual, before we retired for the night we hung our bag of food in a tree to discourage bears. But it wasn't until the next day, after Amy and I had hiked out along this stretch of the Appalachian Trail and had said goodbye and driven back to our respective homes, and after my husband and I had gone down to the village store for ice cream cones, that I did see a bear, while we were driving back to our house; a rolypoly cub that romped across a brook and along the banking, past smaller moss-covered credenzas.

©1998 by Ruth Doan MacDougall
All Rights Reserved
 

Big Chill Reunion with College Friends 

July 7, 1998

All my ocean images have their beginnings in my childhood summers at Rye Harbor in the cottage my grandparents rented, near the jetty.

So during the latest Big Chill get-together with friends from college days, which this year was held in Portsmouth, NH, in an elegant condo that is a far cry from the married students' barracks at Keene Teachers' College (the inspiration for Rumford Teachers' College in The Cheerleader and Snowy), I made the short trip farther down New Hampshire's scrap of coast to Rye, through the Fourth of July hordes. The cottage keeps changing, getting larger, but its essence is still there. And the harbor and the jetty.

Don and I also renewed acquaintance with Portsmouth and the Strawbery (sic) Banke (sic) restoration that inspired Snowy's Old Eastbourne. We've always thought that if we ever had to live in a small city instead of the country, we would choose Portsmouth, and this visit confirmed the notion.

When we returned to the country, we found moose tracks in our garden, craters in the beets.

Copyright 1998 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved   
 

Backyard Wildlife 

June 26, 1998

Last evening during supper on the porch we watched a doe across a beaver pond, standing on and on in the rain, right where we saw one with two fawns last year, the kids misbehaving as kids will, tumbling into the water and wandering astray--then rushing back to her.

At my desk this morning I heard sloshing down in the brook and turned and saw our first moose of summer, with velvet antlers. He meandered around the edge of the garden--not across, thank heavens, as others have done in the past--and stood a while in the backyard, seeming to fill it; HUGE. Then he disappeared into the woods in a blink, which seems impossible.

   
Copyright 1998 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved