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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: 2000 - 2003

2003

That'll Do 

September 28, 2003

Back in the 1960s Don and I had a beloved border collie, from whom we learned many things. One main lesson was that being a pet didn’t fill up enough of a border collie’s life; these dogs need to work. This knowledge has kept us from ever aquiring another border collie, because if we did we’d also have to buy a flock of sheep and a farm and and and so instead, we go to sheepdog trials. I suppose we could be called border collie groupies, though we don’t go to that many, only once or twice a year. But it’s always an occasion. 

Recently we drove over to a farm in East Conway, where we usually go to watch trials. It’s a lovely spot, green fields in an intervale. The morning was green, too, misty and drizzly. Despite the weather, there were lots of vehicles in the parking area, and most of them had dogs attached, dogs lying on the grass or underneath the SUV or pickup truck or under a camper-trailer’s awning. The green was now accented by black-and-white dogs everywhere. 

Even though at trials many dogs are gathered in one place, you seldom hear barking. What you get from the dogs is The Stare, the golden-eyed stare that can transfix a human as well as a sheep. 

As usual, somebody had brought a litter of puppies to sell. TEMPTATION. As usual, we remembered the lesson we’d learned.

We set up our folding chairs in front of the field’s wire fence, took out our binoculars, and settled down to watch. We know the terms--the outrun, when the handler stands at the post and gives the signal and the dog takes off like an Olympic athlete, running flat out in an arc to the far end of the field where three sheep await; the lift, when the dog takes control of moving the sheep; the fetch, when the dog drives them toward the handler; the cross-drive, when the dog maneuvers the sheep through two sets of hurdles; and the pen, when the dog drives the sheep into a little pen. There are various variations, such as shedding, when the dog separates one sheep from the others. But although we know these terms for how things are supposed to proceed, it’s apt to get confusing and often hilarious, especially with young inexperienced dogs whose handlers bellow desperate orders and blow their whistles madly. The main problem with all dogs seems to be to make them obey the command to lie down; they want to keep advancing on the sheep. (Rare to hear “lie” used correctly so often, in all the shouts of “Lie down!”) When everything goes right, the procedure is beautiful, both professional and ancient.

Near us, beside their owners in chairs, some dogs waiting their turn sat utterly still, staring at the course, watching the dog out there as intently as the judges.

When a dog has completed the course, his reward is simply his owner’s comment, “That’ll do.” He also gets to jump into a washtub of water, to cool down.

As lunchtime approached and some women began grilling hamburgers and hotdogs to sell along with potato chips, cookies, and soft drinks, the drizzle turned to rain. Unfazed, the handlers put on slickers. The trials continued, and so did lunch. Don and I thought how Scottish the weather was, but we remembered that when we’d gone to a sheepdog trial in Scotland, the weather had been fine. In fact, it was what they called “bright.”

That had been in the autumn, too, in September 1997. The Drynie Hill Trial was held on Tulloch Hill, in Dingwall, near Inverness. I had read up about it in a British sheepdog trials guide, and in our rented car we drove there from Inverness, turning off onto a narrow lane with trees touching overhead, then straight up a gullied dirt road across fields. Our car was not four-wheel-drive. Eek! On the hilltop other cars were parked, and we drove over to them, noticing with amusement a glass of what had to be Scotch set on the roof of a Land Rover.

We stepped out of our car into the sunny day to see a view beyond our dreams. Snow on Ben Wyvis. Cromarty Firth spread out pastel blue into haze. Patchwork fields below. The clotted houses of the town.

A yell: “Let them out!”

Sheep were released above on the next hilltop--or so we supposed. We couldn’t see from here. The handler stood on a small stump of wood, whistling and shouting as his dog took off on the outrun, racing away to the left, paws thudding, in an instant becoming only a speck on the hillside. We grabbed our binoculars and began passing them back and forth.

Yells, signals: “Come by,” which means right; “Away to me,” left.

The dog lifted and fetched the three sheep. The handler yelled, “Look back!”

Another dog ran forward to crouch and stare golden-eyed at those three sheep, keeping them under control while the first dog ran back up the hill to lift and fetch three more. This is what’s called a double lift, the first we’d ever seen.

“Way to me!” There was some problem. “Oh, shit!” said the handler. Then, “Come by. Steady now.”

And at last, with some difficulty, the cross-drive and penning were completed. Overwhelmed, we decided we needed sustenance and went to the tea tent. Inside, on a long table set up with kettles behind it, there were offerings of buns filled with venison or salmon, and cakes. As we ate slices of orange cake and chocolate cake (the slices handed to us bare, without paper plates) and drank our tea, we chatted with the woman serving, who marveled at the glorious weather and said that usually it’s so windy the tea tent blows away.

We returned to watching and listening.

“Look back!”

This seemed to be the special challenge of the double lift, to remind the dog to go back and get the second batch of sheep.

“Lie down!”

And here on an autumn day in New Hampshire the rain became a downpour. We sighed and decided it was time to leave, but we had experienced enough today to satisfy our groupie needs, so we were content as we lugged our chairs back to our car, many golden eyes giving us The Stare. 

Copyright by Ruth Doan MacDougall © 2003; All rights reserved

Chipmunks and Spring Peepers 

April 24, 2003 

This has been a looooong winter. It started with a snowstorm in October, and as I write this near the end of April we’re getting a coy flurry whisking through. According to the weather bureau’s statistics, the snowfall here was two feet above average this year; I haven’t yet heard any statistics about temperatures, but when we weren’t shoveling, we were shivering.

So, more than usual, Don and I were on the lookout for the first sign of spring, and to us this means chipmunks. And despite those extra two feet of snow that they had to dig up through, the males did appear on schedule in March, going courting, scampering around on the snowbanks and somehow knowing just where to start digging back down to find true love. Now, with the snow almost gone--almost; a friend is saying that she’s ready to use her hair dryer to melt a stubborn snowdrift in her front yard, and I understand how she feels--there are chipmunks everywhere. A constant source of entertainment, they vacuum up sunflower seeds, they have Keystone Kops chases across the yard, they bask in the sun on the woodpile. We say to them idiotically, “We’ve missed you!”

After chipmunks, the next sign of spring to us is the sound of spring peepers. These tree frogs are so tiny that you don’t often see them; they are their sound, which has been described as -everything from screeching to sleigh bells. Because most of our backyard is under water, with beaver ponds and wetlands, we get the sound full-blast and revel in it as if we were kids with a boom box. But this year as the so-called spring commenced, we heard nary a peep. The weather was too cold. 

A week ago there came our first truly warm day. I was climbing a nearby mountain with my hiking group, sweltering in the deciduous woods because the trees hadn’t leafed out, then slipping on ice and snow up in the spruces and firs. During the descent, when we stopped to rest I heard a pulsing over in the woods to my right and realized there must be a pool of some kind, because I was hearing my first spring peepers of the season.

Sure enough, when I got home, we ate supper on the porch for the first time this year, listening to the spring peepers in our backyard and watching chipmunks.

April 24, 2003 copyright 2003 by Ruth Doan MacDougall © 2003; all rights reserved

  

A Fed Bear

January 12, 2003

“Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them,” my father reassured my sister and me when we were kids.

I was none too sure about this, but it seemed to hold true with the black bears in our neck of the woods. Then, as more and more humans began to invade bear territory, bringing lots of yummy food (from Snickers in backpacks to sunflower seeds in backyard bird feeders), the bears’ fear began to fade. Signs and brochures warned hikers and homeowners. Still, whenever I encountered a bear, I figured it would probably want to hightail it in one direction while I retreated in another.

Don and I enjoy watching birds so much that we don’t stop feeding them in the summer, but because of the bears we do bring in the bird feeders early every evening and put them out in the morning. This past summer, one morning after I’d hung out the feeders (a tube and a thistle sock), we were about to leave to do chores for our little caretaking business, when out the kitchen windows we spotted a bear in our backyard, a youngster, about two years old. He promptly knocked over the pole on which the feeders were hanging. Don and I dashed out onto the back porch, yelling, making a commotion that normally scares a bear off.

This wasn’t a normal bear. It settled down with its prize of seeds.

Don blew a whistle. The bear flattened its ears, but otherwise didn’t budge. Don rang the deafening dinner bell with which my mother used to call my father in from the north forty in their farming days. 

No reaction. 

Then Don picked up a couple of our “interesting” rocks from the collection arranged on the porch rail, stepped outdoors, and lobbed them at the bear. Although he missed, this action nonetheless should have scared the bear off, but instead, to our amazement the bear bounded merrily over to the rocks and picked each up in its mouth and spat each out. 

Don said, “Oh, my God, it thinks they’re food. Some damn fool has been feeding it.”

We went back into the kitchen to reconsider the situation. The bear came over to the windows, stood up on its hind legs, and looked in. The morning had been chilly enough so we had the windows down--what if there’d just been screens? Eek! 

Don fetched the .22. He stepped outdoors again and fired over the bear’s head. Good heavens, not even that fazed the creature! Don and I stared at each other. We had to get to work, we were late, but we were being held captive by bruin! 

“The hell with this,” said Don, and he made a run for his pickup truck in the driveway at the side of the house, while I wrung my hands and wailed, “Be careful!” 

Don floored the pickup and leaned on the blaring horn and went zooming around the house into the backyard straight at the bear, who, finally faced with a formidable foe, lumbered off into the woods. 

I ran out and jumped in the pickup, and we went to work, wondering if we’d find our porch or the house itself invaded when we returned. The opposite of Goldilocks?

All was well at day’s end. We phoned Fish & Game, and were told to get in touch again if the problem continued.

It didn’t. As the signs warn, “A fed bear is a dead bear,” and we suspect that the bear went looking for food someplace where the shots weren’t fired over its head.

The other bears of last summer did behave normally, the way my father used to tell me they would. The only other unusual occurrence, to offset that unfortunate young bear, was the sweet sight of triplets; we’ve just seen twin cubs before. Across our backyard mother bear led a row of three rolypoly little cubs, the third one scurrying and tumbling to catch up.

© 2003 by Ruth Doan MacDougall All rights reserved

Laconia High School 45th Reunion 

August, 31, 2002

Instead of being held at the Laconia Country Club or Steele Hill Inn as usual, the forty-fifth reunion of the Laconia High School Class of 1957 was held at Scott & Williams!

Scott & Williams was my inspiration for “Trask’s” in The Cheerleader. As you may recall, Snowy’s father worked at Trask’s as the foreman of the lathe department, and in her youth she was vague about the place: She “understood only that it made the machines that made something else.” As she grew up she paid attention enough to know that Trask’s manufactured gear cutters. 

In actuality, Scott and Williams manufactured circular knitting machinery. My father, Dan, who worked there, used to be ruefully amused to have devoted twenty-five years of his life to women’s stockings, from seams to newfangled seamless. S&W was Laconia’s main employer and had two plants, in Laconia proper and in the section of Laconia called Lakeport. Dan worked at both, but mostly at the Laconia plant, where he became the foreman of the heat-treating department. The Laconia plant was on Union Avenue at the start of Gilford Avenue, where we lived, so Dan could walk to and from work and he usually also walked home for lunch; stress-relief for a hiker.

I think it was in the 1970s that S&W closed. The buildings deterioriated, and various businesses in them came and went.

In 1998, a member of our Class of ’57, Ray Boissoneau, bought the Lakeport plant and began turning it into the Winnipesaukee Exposition Center. For the great occasion of our forty-fifth reunion, he generously donated the use of the “function hall,” the Opechee Room, “Opechee” being the name of the lake on which the Lakeport plant is situated.

So when my husband, Don (an older man, LHS Class of ’55), and I drove down between the building and the lake into the parking lot on Saturday night, August 3, 2002, our minds were already spinning in a confusion of past and present.

And of course that intensified as we went inside, past red and white balloons (the school colors), into the din of voices in the big room, where I saw the school colors again in the white tablecloths and red napkins. Verna Jo gave us red-and-white name stickers to fill out, and Don and I eased into the crowd of people standing around talking, their faces out of focus or in focus in my mind, past-present, past-present. Sometimes the intervening years disappeared immediately and I didn’t have to resort to peering at stickers. No peering was necessary for those friends last seen at our fortieth reunion or for the mini-gang of us who’ve been getting together at mini-reunions in recent years: Cilla, Verna Jo, Martha, Kathy, twins Jean and Joan. (Another set of cheerleading twins in the class, Elaine and Elinor, didn’t attend.)

Verna Jo and Cilla, who organized the reunion, had told me that a lot of the announcements they sent out were returned with addresses unknown, probably because people have retired and moved. So there were approximately seventy people here, only forty actually from our class of 152, the rest spouses. There was much talk of retirement--and of Florida and grandchildren. What the hell could this be all about? Don and I are still only teenagers!

Verna Jo announced it was time to eat. The caterer was good old Contigiani’s (oh, what a name from the past, the restaurant that catered so many special events when we were kids), and we had a fine buffet array from salads to roast beef.

But we were here to talk more than to eat. Table-hopping began before dessert (vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce--more of the school colors) and continued during and afterward. The subjects now ranged from heartbreaking widowhood to giggling reminiscences. I caught up on things with another Ruth, a friend since elementary school and my partner on the cheerleading squad because we were the same height, besides having the same first name. There were three Ruths in our class, and we all ended up with nicknames to keep us sorted out: Doanie, Bunny, and Ronnie. Thus the inspiration for Henrietta Snow’s nickname, though she was the only Henrietta in her class.

At our fortieth reunion, Cilla and Verna Jo had had an auction of items donated by classmates to replenish our coffers. This time, Verna Jo presided over a shorter version, with Ray Boissoneau the amusing auctioneer. Afterwards, there was more mingling, and then people began to leave.

As Don and I left, the background music was Connie Francis singing “My Happiness.” 

45th Reunion by Ruth Doan MacDougall © 2002
All rights reserved
 

Birdbrain

June 11, 2002

I blame my sister for the cardinal’s obsession. 

Two years ago, in early springtime, Penny arrived for a visit in her huge RV, which filled the entire length of one of our two driveways, the one we call “the bulkhead driveway.” The RV’s side mirrors were proportionately large. Don and I had noticed a pair of cardinals in our yard and were delighted by the rare sight, although we feared that the northward spread of the cardinals’ range in recent years was another disruption caused by global warming. The male cardinal, in turn, noticed the RV’s passenger-side mirror.

Narcissus, we thought at first as the handsome red cardinal perched on that mirror, and then, as he began to peck furiously at the image within, we decided he was trying to drive off this rival male. Throughout Penny’s visit, the cardinal came back again and again to the mirror and fought his reflection in vain. Penny and I said, “Men!”

When Penny left, Don and I figured that was that, and without thinking, Don moved his pickup truck out the ell driveway, back to the bulkhead driveway. Indoors, we happened to glance out a window and saw, astonished, that the cardinal had transferred his obsession to the pickup’s passenger side mirror. We found this clever and hilarious until, as days passed, the mirror grew marred by the cardinal’s beak and guano encrusted the passenger door.

“Okay,” Don said finally, “no more Mr. Nice Guy.” He moved the pickup to the other side of the house, hiding it at the edge of the woods, and returned in triumph to the house. About a minute later, when he looked out a window, he saw that the cardinal had located the pickup and was perched again on the mirror.

Bird experts we consulted told us, “Cardinals are very territorial.”

 Now ensued a battle of wits between Don and the cardinal similar to those Don has waged with squirrels intent on our birdfeeder. Don put an old sock over the pickup’s mirror. The cardinal switched over to the mirror on the driver’s side. Don pulled a sock onto that one. Aha! Don had won!

The victory was Pyrrhic. Soon the cardinal discovered our Subaru parked in the ell driveway, and soon the Subaru too was wearing socks. We had at last suceeded in thwarting the cardinal, but we couldn’t drive anywhere without having to remember to remove the socks before we got in the pickup or car and to put them back on when we returned. Often we forgot and found ourselves blind on our sides and stared at by drivers of oncoming cars. Then when we got home, we had to remember to put the socks back on, and we had to explain our vehicles’ attire to everybody who visited us or slowed down driving past and hollered, “What’s with the socks?”

-The cardinal pair stayed through the summer--the first time that had happened to us--and then left. Off came the socks. 

The next spring, what should we see one day but a cardinal claiming the pickup’s passenger side mirror as his territory! It had to be the same bird. We laughed and welcomed him back, and the socks routine began again.

This spring, we watched and waited for the cardinal to appear again on the pickup. He never did. We concluded sadly that he hadn’t survived the winter and we were surprised at how much we missed his antics. He wasn’t a pet, and we couldn’t exactly go out and get another mirror-obsessed cardinal to fill the little gap in our lives—

And then a couple of weeks ago, as Don was reading on the porch he heard a strange metallic rat-a-tat and followed the noise to see a male downy woodpecker perched on our metal mailbox at the end of the ell driveway, hammering away. “A different drummer!” Don told me. I listened and said, “A steel band!” The woodpecker has become obsessed with the sound, returning to the mailbox many times every day, and we hear the drumming reverberating through the house and are highly amused. I can hear it now, as I write this.

Birdbrains by Ruth Doan MacDougall © 2002
All rights reserved

Drought  

March 1, 2002

Recently, while I was making supper, I turned on the kitchen sink faucet and out came only a trickle.

In the next instant the sequence of emotions was: panic; fatalistic resignation, for hadn’t this been just what I’d been fearing?; panic; a vision of all the consequences; sardonic amusement because this was a Saturday and things always break down on weekends; panic. And then I ran for Don, who was reading in the living room.

“It’s happened!” I wailed. “It’s our turn! We’ve run out of water!”

During this long drought in our part of the world, we’ve watched new beaches emerge on the lakes as the water level dropped, and we’ve listened to everybody’s tales of woe about wells going dry, trips to laundromats, sponge baths, flushing toilets only when necessary and only with a bucket. The well-drilling companies have waiting lists three months long. Even the old farm in our neighborhood, supplied by a dug well for over a century, has had to resort to a drilled well.

Those of you who’ve read my A Lovely Time Was Had by All may remember descriptions of well-drilling problems. These were inspired by our own experiences, which left us with a well drilled 560 feet deep. We were also left with empty pockets, but, we reasoned as we tried to find a bright side, the damn thing was so deep maybe it wouldn’t ever go dry. It did once when I used it to water our garden, so we resorted to another method for that (See “Going up Brook”). During this drought we’ve kept hoping its depth would save us.

To return to Don, reading in happy oblivion before I interrupted with my discovery of catastrophe. As some of you know, we have a little caretaking business, looking after summer places. So Don is used to emergencies. He listened to me and then got up from his chair, plainly thinking hard about possibilities and solutions. My panic ebbed a bit. I remembered how Tom Hanks, in an interview about Castaway, when asked what person would he want to have with him should he ever actually be cast away on a desert island, replied, “My high school shop teacher. He built our sets for the drama club. That man could build anything!” I had laughed because I’ve always said I’d want Don on a desert isle for practical reasons as well as romantic. And besides being able to build anything, Don can also fix anything. Usually.

He went into the kitchen, opened the trapdoor into the cellar, and climbed down the ladder. I stood looking at the half-made supper, imagining washing dishes with melted snow or water lugged from the brook, which hasn’t yet frozen over during this mild winter.

Don called up, “Could you open my toolbox and bring me a screwdriver?” Then he added, remembering my ignorance, “They have red handles; any one of them is okay.”

I rushed and grabbed three red-handled implements, and he climbed up the ladder, chose one, then disappeared again. 

He called, “Could you bring me the whisk broom?”

I certainly know what that is, and I ran and got it and gave it to him. Again he disappeared. I checked our big container of water we keep on hand for the many times the electricity goes off. We had that to drink. But no showers, oh misery!

Don came up the ladder, crossed to the sink, turned on the faucet, and washed his hands.

It took me a moment to understand what he was doing. I gasped, “We’re not out of water?”

“Not this time,” said Don, ever the pessimist. “This time the circuit board for the well pump failed. 
Remember when we had the new pump put in, maybe ten years ago? The plumber left me the old circuit board. Said to keep it down there just in case. So I swapped it. I’ll give him a call Monday to see what else to do, but we’re okay for now.”

I leapt at Don with hugs and kisses.

Like so many things, water is precious. 

© 2002by Ruth Doan MacDougall © 2002
  All rights reserved

2001

Friends 

October 23, 2001

One weekend this summer my niece, Thane, and her friend-since-girlhood Amy came to visit us and go for a hike with me.
As we climbed nearby Mounts Morgan and Percival, I listened. This was their first real get-together in some time, so there was much to catch up on, the obvious milestones--Amy’s return to college for a career in medicine and her upcoming marriage, along with Thane’s plans to return to her career as an environmental lawyer after an interlude of full-time motherhood--and the more subtle subjects that women weave into their talk. Because I’m writing HENRIETTA SNOW, the concluding novel in what’s become the CHEERLEADER trilogy, friendship has been much on my mind as I follow Snowy, Bev, and Puddles onward through the years, much as I now followed Thane and Amy across the ridge between the mountains. When, on the summit of Mount Percival, Thane showed Amy how to do some of the latest yoga positions- she’d learned, the sight seemed to sum up for me the importance of lifelong friendships. I grabbed my camera.

Then came September 11th. As everybody else did, I phoned or e-mailed all our family and friends. We were lucky; they were safe. Nonetheless, I wept. As everybody did.

Afterward, reading the website guestbook, I wept yet again when I saw the message from Donna Cardinali of Westwood, NJ, saying that the husband of one of her dearest friends had been killed at the World Trade Center and that for comfort Donna had reread THE CHEERLEADER.

I too had turned to a novel for comfort. Like Snowy, I usually run for an Agatha Christie or some other favorite mystery writer. (Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter saw me through my husband’s heart attack last year.) Sometimes I choose other old favorites, old friends: often Christopher Morley’s KITTY FOYLE, or Nancy Mitford’s PURSUIT OF LOVE. This time I thought of a writer I’d long loved but nearly forgotten in recent years: Margery Sharp. My mother introduced me to her back when I was in junior high--or was it even earlier? With the “Gang,” I’d gone to a Saturday matinee at the local theater, and the movie happened to be JULIA MISBEHAVES. Upon hearing the title, my mother told me the movie was based on Margery Sharp’s NUTMEG TREE, which she’d bought in paperback. I pounced on the book and read and reread it and continued to do so through many ensuing years, while also reading Margery Sharp’s other novels.

Now, in September, I searched my bookcases and found the one Margery Sharp I happened to own, bought secondhand a long time ago: CLUNY BROWN. Ah, Cluny! I settled into the companionship of this old friend, but as I read it I saw it anew, set in 1938, published in 1944, a light comedy in terrible times--and a tale about the importance of seemingly contradictory aspects of life, change and continuity. It’s a novel to be read now, in these times.

My love to you all, dear friends.
 
Copyright by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved   

Wild Turkeys 

March 12, 2001

Jurassic Park creatures. That's how my friend Gloria describes them, and that's the jolt into a prehistoric menagerie I get whenever I glimpse something large and strange out of the corner of my eye and blink and find myself in the presence of wild turkeys.

They've been reintroduced into New England in recent years to give hunters something more to shoot, but they're also giving the rest of us a lot of frights succeeded by amusement. Wild turkeys are big! When a couple of dozen stroll into your backyard to peck under the birdfeeder, it's an invasion.

In the summer I meet them parading down the middle of our road, and like a goosegirl I find myself herding them in front of me. I watch the progress of the babies and report to Don, "Ah, they grow up so fast!" Last summer I witnessed a chilling Peter-and-the-Wolf sequence: Walking along, I spotted a coyote heading for, I thought, the nearby farm's henhouse. Then as I continued on, I saw the flock of turkeys, adults and youngsters, and realized what the coyote was actually stalking.

Although they usually act tame, our wild turkeys are camera-shy, but Don managed to snap this photo from the porch. He suggests the caption should be: "Turkeys Stuffing Themselves."

 

2000

Meadowbrook Salon

September 3, 2000

This isn't your ordinary trip to the beauty parlor.

There really are a meadow and a brook here. There are also mountain views across these meadows that open up after I've driven past assorted houses along the Ossipee Mountain Road in Moultonborough. Suddenly, rounding a curve, I'm thrown back centuries into a farming scene, with cows grazing in a giant bowl of grass beneath the encircling mountains.

Generations of a family have lived in this neighborhood. I drive past the first white farmouse and its big red barn across the road, to the next white house, the Meadowbrook Salon. I've been coming here fifteen years to have my hair cut by the renowned Daniel Bryant, yet the trip never fails to surprise and delight me.

Originally called Helen's, the Meadowbrook was started by Danny's mother, a beautiful woman who still takes care of her group of customers. Danny makes the rest of us look beautiful, as well as the glorious gardens, tubs, and windowboxes. Beauty abounds in and outside this beauty salon.

© 2000 by Ruth Doan MacDougall
All rights reserved

Lunch on the Porch 

April 25, 2000

Amongst my many rituals that signal spring, from raking mulch off the herb garden to rereading Edna St. Vincent Millay's pessimistic "Spring" and optimistic "Goose-Girl" and then browsing through the rest of her Collected Poems that Don gave me back in 1957, always discovering a good one I'd somehow missed before (this year, "How Did I Bear It"), there is the first lunch on the porch.

Sometimes we have to wear jackets, but this year it was suddenly, if briefly, T-shirt weather. Like creatures emerging from a winter cave, we sat basking. The spring peepers were screeching in the beaver pond, a rare cardinal flashed into the bittersweet, and a chipmunk sat on the porch step eating its lunch too, sunflower seeds. To celebrate the occasion, we had dessert--Snackwell cookies.


Copyright 2000 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved   

Damn Ice

February 27, 2000

I awoke at 4:30 A.M., listened, and tried to convince myself that the noise I heard in the living room was the companionable creaking of the house. But no. It was the sound of dripping, the awful sound I hadn't heard in recent years- since we'd had the roof repaired. An ice dam leak.

Going fearfully into the living room, I remembered how a family friend used to remark to her husband, "I don't mind the ice dams, dear, until they start sizzling on the stove when I'm trying to cook." This had happened to me, back in our early years in this house when I was cooking on an oil range; I was less philosophical. Now, as I turned on the living room light, I saw water running down the inside of the front door and also plopping from the ceiling smack onto the paperwork piled on my mother's mahogany console table. I ran for towels, mop, and to awaken Don.


We pulled on clothes, boots. In the cellar Don grabbed my father's rock-collecting hammer (which Don has found handier against ice than an axe) and the roof rake, fitting its long-handled parts together. We have two driveways; Don backed his pickup down one and I backed our car down the other, both of us turning headlights on high so that we could see as clearly as possible the front of the house.


In this spotlight, Don tackled the roof, raking the snow off, chopping away the ice that had dammed up along the eaves. He came indoors for breakfast and then in daylight returned to the chore.

While spreading the paperwork out to dry, I thought of how some city folks on a morning TV show had discussed the advantages and disadvantages of country living, concluding solemnly, "There's not much going on there, so you have more discretionary time."


Copyright 2000 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
All Rights Reserved  

A Male Milestone 

February 5, 2000

Readers of The Cheerleader know what the girls considered the Big Milestone. I have recently discovered that there is one of comparable importance to males. As we were driving home from a neighboring town, Don began staring at the dashboard.

He rejoiced, "It's going to change!"

I said, "What's going to what?"

He pointed to the odometer. "On this trip, it's going to turn 100,000!"

But as we came to the road to our house, the numbers were still hovering on the brink. So what did Don do? He drove past, into the village. I wondered if other guys there seeing him hunched over the steering wheel peering intently at the dash would know what wonderful thing was about to happen.

Through the village Don drove, past another road to our house, out to the longest way home, and there on a narrow dirt road that might have had Big Milestone possibilities decades ago, the numbers crept forward all the way, from all those nines to all those zeroes, and Don stomped on the brake to admire the mileage.


Copyright 2000 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;
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