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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: 2014 - 2017

BOOK REVIEWING

June 18, 2017

Back in the 1980s, I did a lot of book reviewing. And last week when I was thinking about a summer rereading list and checking our bookcases, I came across books I’d reviewed. Usually I gave my copies to the library when I was finished (or if I was reviewing from bound galleys, I shared them with family), but I’d saved a few I might like to reread someday even though I’d already read them twice. These included Faith Sullivan’s Mrs. Demming and the Mythical Beast and Howard Frank Mosher’s Marie Blythe. I remembered reading the latter on the Maine island of Matinicus, the ocean out the windows, with pencil and legal pad making notes for a review in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
               At the outset I mostly reviewed books for the Christian Science Monitor. I had been asked to do a monthly column about first novels; the book editor wanted a novelist for this job. Eventually the newspaper needed the space for other things, and I went on to review for other newspapers, particularly Newsday. I had developed my little rules, such as that reading of a book twice. If I was choosing the book, I chose one I was pretty sure I’d enjoy. Why waste everybody’s time on a bad review? If I was sent a book by an editor and was disappointed by it, I tried to warn off readers from spending their money buying it but tried to find something positive to say. (“Workmanlike” was a handy adjective.) If I really hated it, I wrote a draft ranting, and then, having got that out of my system, I wrote a second calmer—and, I hoped, fairer—draft.
               When Don and I started our caretaking business, I only had time for writing novels, not reviews too, and thus ended my reviewing career.
               All these memories got me thinking about how much things have changed during the ensuing years. In the past, authors usually only heard from readers via mail forwarded by the publisher. But nowadays, with reader reviews such as Amazon, we can hear directly. This is a marvel—marvelous!
               I also wondered how you find inspirations for new books to read. In online book clubs and/or—? Does seeing a review or promotion for a new book remind you that you own earlier books by that author that now you’ll want to read again?
               I'm planning an Agatha Christie reread this week!

© 2017 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

APRIL FLOWERS

April 30, 2017

         To me the funniest springtime moment so far has been the sight of Don standing in the backyard looking down at a chickadee who had alighted on the lawn near his feet. The expression on Don's face was benevolent and when he spoke to the tiny bird his tone was affectionate, but his words were: "You stupid #%*#."
               As he well knew, however, the chickadee was very smart, remembering that Don's presence in this location near the lilac bush and the bird-feeder pole usually meant a refill of the bird feeder. We've taken down the feeder because the bears are awake, but the chickadee was checking, just in case.
               Here in Sandwich, spring has at last arrived. Where snowplows deposited mountains of snow throughout the winter, there are now only a few dirty white lumps left. Elsewhere, the ground is bare and the grass has suddenly turned green—greener—even emerald in some places. The daffodils seemingly shot up and bloomed in a blink. We are even eating springtime; the chives are up.
               Phoebes have been nesting in the eaves of our ell since we moved here forty years ago (and who knows how long before that). Now we're watching this year's return and the application of mud above one of the ell windows, the fluttering of wings past the panes. The phoebes get their mud from the beaver pond's banks—and more conveniently from the trench Don has dug across the lawn for the overflow from the cellar's sump pump (another feature of springtime here). We imitate their call back to them: "Phee-bee!"
               There are always jokes about the noise in the country, about how people from "away" can't stand the racket of the damn birds and brooks or about how others can't stand the boring quiet. We've got both going on. Sometimes when we sit on the porch we become aware of spells of silence so complete that we realize how rare it is. Other times we start laughing over the love song of the little frogs called spring peepers as they seek romance at the tops of their lungs, the high-pitched pulsing so loud that we brace ourselves against it, a force of Nature. 

© 2017 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

APRIL SNOWSTORM

April 1, 2017

               In my first novel, The Lilting House, which I wrote in my twenties, I described my childhood as “a time of legends.” These legends were the stories the grown-ups told about their lives—in general and also specifically. One of the latter, which I heard every year, was the Legend of the April Snowstorm, and eventually I was the one telling it. I’ll repeat it once again now, as an April snowstorm blurs the windows beside my desk.
               April snowstorms are common in New Hampshire, but this one was remembered because it occurred when my mother and I—a newborn baby, her firstborn—were scheduled to leave the hospital. (Well, I wasn’t exactly newborn; back in those halcyon days, mother and baby stayed in the hospital a lot longer, in this case two weeks.) My grandmother Ruth had come up from Massachusetts to help out at the farmhouse, and she and my father drove to the hospital to fetch my mother and me. The storm worsened on the drive home, on country roads. I can imagine the tension in the car, my young father at the wheel, the fearsome responsibility of the baby. What if the car got stuck in the snowdrifts? 
               It didn’t, they reached home, stirred up the woodstoves, and the legend began, with its happy ending.
              So here we are again with an April snowstorm just when everybody is desperate for daffodils! We all always say that springtime snow won’t linger long on the ground. Let’s try to believe that, even if we know better. Today’s online Sandwich Board list of events includes an announcement of a series of gardening programs presented by the New Hampshire Master Gardeners starting on April 12. Let’s at least be gardening in our minds.

2016

RESTORING THE COLONIAL THEATER

July 3, 2016

      Five years ago I wrote a “Ruth’s Neighborhood” piece about Laconia’s Colonial Theater. Built in 1915 for plays and vaudeville acts, it still retained its splendor in the 1940s and 1950s when my generation went there regularly, from childhood Saturday matinees to teenage evening dates. The Cheerleader’s fictional version of it says, “When Snowy was younger, the theater had seemed to her a palace, its chandeliers and gold scrollwork and dark-red curtain and plush seats so rich and wonderful that she couldn’t believe she was allowed in for just twelve cents.”
     But, trying to keep up with the times, in 1983 it was divided into five theaters. This multiplex idea didn’t succeed, and when I wrote my 2011 piece the Colonial had closed and been put up for sale.
     Last year a miracle happened. Through the Belknap Economic Development Council, 609 Main Street LLC bought it and embarked on a $15 million restoration and renovation project.
     This spring, work began. In photographs in the Laconia newspapers we’ve seen the removal of partitions and five projection booths and the dropped ceiling. We’ve read th at the method is more “disassembly” than demolition. Gradually what we remember is being revealed, such as the beautiful murals and proscenium arch.
     The movie theater’s property includes several stores along Main Street and a side street, Canal Street. On Snowy and Tom’s first date, he parked his Chevy convertible on just such a side street around the corner from the theater. Three of the Canal Street businesses have had to look for new premises, because they were built in the location of the original entrance to the stage, through which, as the Laconia Daily Sun reports, “elephants and automobiles along with stage sets, sound equipment, and other large items once passed.” Don and I wish we’d known in our youth about those elephants in the theater’s early history. 

is that piece describing our own Colonial Theater history.

2015

SAWYER'S REUNION

September 18, 2015

 Reading the newspaper in early July, Don said, “Hey, Ruth, listen to this!” and read aloud, “‘Are You A Former Sawyer’s Employee? Sign up to receive your exclusive invitation to our Seventieth Anniversary Employee Reunion Ice Cream Social.’”
     Well, I definitely am a former employee of Sawyer’s Dairy Bar in Gilford, New Hampshire. I worked there the summer of 1955, scooping ice cream. So I e-mailed Sawyer’s, and there followed a warm reply from Ann, who was helping the present owners, Larry and Pati Litchfield, arrange this reunion. (The dairy bar had been started by George and Ruth Sawyer, who owned the dairy farm.) Then came the announcement of the date: “The Ice Cream Social and Reunion has been scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, August 26th, from 2 to 4 on Pati’s Porch.”
     I remembered a phrase of my mother’s: I’ll be there with bells on. In my case, I wished I could be there with my old waitressing uniform on, but alas, I hadn’t saved it. Probably I’d never been able to get the hot-fudge stains out of it. But that was the spirit in which I RSVP’d that Don and I would be there.
     As the day approached, I kept thinking more and more about that summer of 1955, the summer after my sophomore year in high school and after Don’s senior year. In The Cheerleader, during the summer of 1956 Snowy wonders if that summer of 1955 “would forever be the happiest summer of her life.” From the vantage point of this summer of 2015, it ranked as one of the happiest—and extremely young.
     On August 26, we were a few minutes early so we drove past Sawyer’s and headed to a Scenic View pull-off for a wide view of Lake Winnipesaukee. We hadn’t done this in quite a while, a longer while than we’d realized. The sign for the view was still there, but the view was gone, the trees in front of it grown too high. The passage of time.
     We drove back to Sawyer’s. After my best friend, Sally, and I worked there a restaurant section was added on, to the right side of the dairy bar. On the left side is another addition, an enclosure where people can eat their take-out meals and ice-cream cones at tables. This is known as Pati’s Porch. We were the first to arrive in the porch. Ann greeted us, and as she was giving us name tags other former employees came in. There ended up about a dozen of us, including spouses and Ann and the Litchfields.
     We sat at the tables and reminisced, looking through the Sawyer’s reunion scrapbook of old photos and clippings. I talked to Butch, the older brother of Linda, who wasn’t present. Sally and I had worked with Linda, and, if I’m remembering correctly, Linda took part in a water fight that inspired a description in One Minus One. Shenanigans! Butch recalled an after-work stunt of squeezing in and out of the serving openings in the dairy bar, to see who could do it the fastest. I contributed the tale of how my sister’s boyfriend, who drove a Sawyer’s milk truck, once climbed up onto the roof of the truck and hung on while his Sawyer’s buddy did wheelies, trying to spill him off. 
     Butch recalled how groups of camp kids would arrive fifteen minutes before closing time, wanting not only cones but also frappes and banana splits. How Sally and I had dreaded that! John, another member of our generation, talked about making milk deliveries and the time he’d swung out of the Sawyer’s parking lot onto the road too fast and two cases of milk slid off the truck’s tailgate—“and soon there was George out in the road, shoveling up the glass.” This of course got us talking about milk delivered in glass bottles that sat on doorsteps until brought indoors “and in winter you could tell how cold the weather was by how high the frozen milk at the top had pushed up the paper cap.”
     Of the younger generation, one woman who’d worked here as a cook recalled the breading of onion rings and chicken. I was vastly relieved that I’d only had to cope with ice cream.
     Ah, ice cream. Sawyer’s most popular flavor is Black Raspberry and I wore a dark pink blouse in honor of that but I chose an old Sawyer’s favorite of mine, Orange Pineapple. Don had Chocolate Chip. Butch had a banana split—three scoops, three toppings, a mountain of whipped cream—and declared, “Sawyer’s makes the best.”
     Such a happy summer, 1955. All these years later we were very happy wishing Sawyer’s a Happy Seventieth Anniversary.

© 2015 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; 
All rights reserved

GOING TO THE DUMP

May 28, 2015

     Don and I grew up in residential parts of Laconia, New Hampshire, where the trash was collected weekly. So town dumps didn’t become part of our lives until later, in 1962, when we were renting a house in Lisbon, New Hampshire (the inspiration for the fictional north-country town of Newburgh where Tom Forbes taught).
     There we learned that going to the dump was quite a ritual, greeted with joy by our border collie, Heathcliff. (We’d named him that because of his looks even when just a puppy. As Garrison Keillor would say, English majors!) Whenever Don began loading garbage cans into our green Jeep (which I also gave to Tom), in a flash Heathcliff too was in the Jeep, in his seat in the back on a shelf along which Don had built a wooden rail, a doggy version of a seat belt. Up front we also had seat belts, installed after we bought the Jeep because they weren’t deemed necessary then.

     The Jeep loaded, off we’d go. In those days, a town dump was just that. We dumped out the garbage cans’ contents into a big pit. I worried about Heathcliff’s paws amid the debris of tin cans and glass and God knew what on the edges of the pit, and I worried about rats, but we couldn’t deny him the bliss of exploring. A dog’s nose must’ve received a billion fascinating smells at the town dump.
     
 We moved on to other towns, lived in apartments with trash pickup, until in 1971 we bought our first house, out in the woods of Farmington, New Hampshire, where we learned another town dump. We particularly enjoyed the going-to-the-dump technique of one of our neighbors. He procrastinated about making the trip and simply threw trash into the back of his old truck, letting it accumulate, and when he couldn’t heap it any higher he would proceed very slowly to the dump, top-heavy and teetering.
     In my novel A Lovely Time Was Had by All, published in 1982, I described a fictional dump of that era:
In Millsted we used to drive through a gate up a zigzag course around beer cans and automobile tires and bedsprings to reach a scene from hell. For, although Millsted pretended to go along with the state’s burning ban, the dump regularly and mysteriously caught on fire. Smelly smoke would roll into the sky, and on the gravel plateau the “accidental” fires burned in the garbage piled at the brink of a cliff. Disturbed momentarily by our arrival, seagulls would soar up and circle, mewing. Aerosol cans exploded. Choking, eyes streaming, we would fling our own offerings onto the flames, while the seagulls alighted and walked around digging with their bills into ripped plastic garbage bags. We became acquainted with a one-legged seagull whose missing leg, we assumed, had been amputated by an aerosol explosion. The seagull would balance on its one leg and then fly up and come down and balance again, doing a hornpipe without a peg leg.

     In 1976 we settled in Sandwich, New Hampshire. Here we’ve watched the changeover from a dump to a “recycling center and transfer station,” a term everybody ignores except town officials. In our first experience of this dump, it was much like the fictional Dinsmere dump I described in A Lovely Time Was Had by All:
The Dinsmere dump was a true landfill, its garbage buried beneath the sandy soil, its dunes kept ever-changing by bulldozers. It had a million-dollar view of the mountains enjoyed year-round by Jonathan Ferguson, an old man who lived there with his pet rat. Their winter residence was a tarpaper shack set precariously on a knoll surrounded by a collection of broken chairs, discarded lawnmowers, doorless refrigerators, and scrap metal. In the summer, we had learned when we introduced ourselves to him during our first dump run, they moved to the airy chambers of their vacation home, an old station wagon lacy with rust, where the rat roomed in the upholstery. At any time of year the rat accompanied Jonathan Ferguson whenever he drove the station wagon to the village to seek supplies; the rat was fond of going for rides.
     The recycling system included therapeutic exercise: you threw your glass bottles, with satisfying smashes, into bins according to color. The bins were beautiful, so in this novel I next described the lovely time had by the narrator’s husband, Jacob, a Sunday painter:
The sight of the recycling bins made his fingers itch: all the green glass bottles heaped together, the clear bottles sparkling separate, brown bottles glowing, the tin cans’ interiors shining, the colorful labels cheerfully prevaricating. We could live here at the dump, I thought, and he would paint recycling pictures and we would hold tailgate showings. The Garbage Gallery!

     Nowadays we don’t use the bins and the recycling is simplified, the procedures presided over with authority by Marilyn, the supervisor. As the Sandwich Web site says, the recycling center “provides excellent recycling opportunities where residents can exercise their environmental stewardship of resources and help reduce the bulk amount of trash.”
     One tradition continues: looking for “good stuff” at the dump. My best friend, Sally, has claimed that her husband brings back from their dump more than he takes. He’s not alone. At the Sandwich dump the good stuff is put aside in the Swap Shop area. Don and I like to check what’s new here, and sometimes we contribute to or subtract from its inventory—for example, we left my old Ball jars when I gave up canning and brought home a well-used tricycle, which Don placed on the lawn near the end of our driveway in hopes of slowing down summer people who drive too fast on our little country road. (It worked with some people, who thought “Tricycle—yikes, a kid somewhere near!” and hit the brake. Others blithely sped on.)
     Our best discovery came not from the Swap Shop but from the contractors’ waste bin. Don’s eye was caught by the charm of a small straight-back chair, even though it was in sad shape, its cane seat gone, pieces of its back missing. He rescued the poor little thing. At home, he took the chair apart, created new pieces to replace the lost ones, put it back together, and caned a new seat. The chair fit my mother's old desk and soon had become my favorite chair. Over the ensuing years the "new" seat has worn out and is now covered with a cushion until he canes the next new seat.
      
So we have experienced the evolution of town dumps from fiery pits to recycling centers. This is progress we approve of, but we don’t think Heathcliff’s nostrils would.
P.S. A fellow New Hampshire writer, Rebecca Rule, wrote a hilarious story called “Perley Gets a Dump Sticker: A Harrowing Tale.” It’s in her collection titled Could Have Been Worse: True Stories, Embellishments, and Outright Lies.

© 2015 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; all rights reserved

DESKS

February 2015

This essay is posted HERE, in the Literary Pastimes: Anthology of Essays section, with photographs.

2014

A CURMUDGEON'S LAMENT

January 1, 2014

     2014! A new year now lies ahead, adding a year to our ages and anniversaries and memories. In recent years, whenever Don and I celebrate any anniversary (birthday, wedding, our first date, our move to Sandwich, etc.), I find myself counting the things that didn’t exist back then—such as, depending on the anniversary: we didn’t have a flat-screen TV then—or we didn’t have a color TV—or we didn’t have any TV whatsoever. No TV? At that particular thought, childhood memories zoom in, of sitting at the kitchen table with my sister, Penny, listening to radio programs—The Shadow, Nick Carter, The House of Mystery—while playing double solitaire or drawing pictures on pieces of our father’s ream of manila second sheets, and munching popcorn popped in a wire basket shaken over a stove burner, not popped in—hey, another thing that didn’t exist then!—a microwave.
    Inevitably, all this leads to our discussing these things that don’t exist anymore and also things that still exist but don’t work anymore or don’t work so well as they used to. Such as:
     Speaking of TV. When it went digital a few years ago, Don and I lost our PBS channel. We now can only get the three basic channels, and they become two in the spring when the trees leaf out. Of course, we’re still using a roof antenna . . . which we can’t get serviced any longer.
     Lightbulbs don’t cast light anymore.
     Don’s mother was a telephone operator. She had a distinctive voice, so you knew who it was when she said, “Number, please.” Don and I don’t have iPhones, just regular landline phones and one simple cell phone, but they are always causing problems. And people who phone us on their cells have problems too; they crackle in and out and vanish. I say wistfully to Don, “Remember when telephones used to work and your mother used to say, ‘Number, please’?” And this doesn’t even start getting into the maddening problem of telemarketing calls day in day out.
     Warner’s has stopped making my favorite line of underpants, so in department and lingerie stores I’m now seeking a replacement, thus far in vain. A quest for a holy grail!
     Penny points out that it’s hard to find dresses and slacks with side zippers.
    Here’s one that everybody of a certain age talks about. At gas stations, back when the price of a gallon was today’s pocket change, you didn’t have to pump your own gas. It was done for you, your windshield was cleaned, the oil was checked, and the gas station gave you presents, like steak knives and S&H Green Stamps. Once during a series of fill-ups I acquired an entire set of spices and a spice rack to put them on.
     I enjoy sitting in an armchair and browsing through a catalog. I don’t want to look at items on a screen. I relish the feel and smell of a new L.L.Bean catalog.
     Speaking of browsing and catalogs, we miss browsing through library card catalogs, those splendid pieces of furniture. It was fascinating to hunt through the card trays for some subject and learn more than what you were searching for. Don, retired librarian that he is, thinks all libraries should have saved their card catalogs, at least for backup if not for beauty.
     Nowadays you need a special implement, a package opener, to open impenetrable plastic packaging.
And I had to buy a special gadget to pull the tops up and off soup cans, in a terrifying maneuver. How did these lethal tabs on cans ever get past safety regulations? When shopping, I look for cans without tabs, to be cranked open on our can opener.
Speaking of supermarket-shopping, paper grocery bags don’t seem as strong as they used to be. And some cashiers look at you in a hostile manner if you request paper, if you don’t want plastic bags flopping around and spilling.
     The new Glade spray-can design doesn’t spray. It spews and oozes and clogs. 
     Even if the directions that come with purchases seem to be written by somebody for whom English is a first language, they are invariably incomplete or inaccurate. For example, Don had to ignore the directions for a picnic table he’d bought unassembled at a lumberyard. If he’d followed them, he told me, “the table would’ve been knock-kneed.”
     Curtain-shade pulls are becoming extinct.
Extinct! Sweet little Maine shrimps have been a winter treat for us, but last year the shrimp-fishing season was cut back in an attempt to save them and we couldn’t find any for sale here, even though we’re next-door to Maine. This year there’ll be no season at all. Our three TV channels are out of Maine, and on one we saw an unemployed shrimp fisherman say, “Maybe if we do this, they’ll come back.” An official said, “Maine shrimp like cold water. Until then . . . ”
     Don and I are also fond of salt cod, another winter treat. We’re even fond of the small wooden boxes it is sold in. I make the creamed cod that our mothers used to make and also a salt-cod chowder whose recipe I created from various sources, including Julia Child. This winter the supermarkets around here aren’t stocking salt cod, and the reason for this is, we are told, that there isn’t any demand (except us). It’s become too old-fashioned?
     Gilbey’s gin bottles are no longer frosted. An old family friend in Massachusetts, known as Aunt Dot and the inspiration for my novel Aunt Pleasantine, always brought a bottle of Gilbey’s when she came to visit (as well as a box of coconut cakes from Bailey’s in Boston). To my young eyes that frosted bottle seemed as pretty as ornamental glass.
     Ah, glass bottles! Don and I are sure that the Coca-Cola in the green glass bottles of our youth tasted colder on a summer day than in any of the Coke containers that followed. There was a Coca-Cola bottling plant in our hometown, Laconia, and you could stop on the sidewalk and look in the big windows at the green bottles going around and around. Did the term “recycled” exist back then? Whenever we bought a Coke anyplace, we checked its bottom to see if “Laconia” was there in raised letters, to identify its place of birth, the same as our own.
     I know this lament will continue into the new year, but it is in its way a celebration—of the past and of our luck in having lived long enough for this long look back. And there are new things to celebrate. We recently found just the right shade pulls, thanks to the Internet. Now, for the underpants quest . . .
Happy New Year!

© 2014 by Ruth Doan MacDougall; 
All rights reserved

Aprons

April 15, 2014

     My sister, Penny, and I have been talking lately about aprons. Her daughter wears aprons while working in the kitchen. Penny and I never much did. We’ve read that the younger generations of women are intrigued by aprons, are buying and actually wearing them. “Vintage” aprons are sold on eBay! But when Penny and I became housewives in the early 1960s, did we consciously rebel against the apron tradition? Did other women in our generation?
     Our mother (Ernestine/Ernie) and grandmother (Ruth, called by us Ma) always put on an apron in the kitchen, aprons made by Ma. Some were pinafore aprons with ruffles and various pretty patterns. We especially remember one that had a pattern of strawberries. And I’ve written elsewhere about my very early memory of being in the garden with Ernie, who was wearing a pinafore apron. I don’t remember the pattern, but I remember ruffles over the shoulders—and a pocket from which she produced a salt shaker.      She picked a tomato, salted it, and we ate it, warm and sunny.
In our childhood, Ernie mostly wore housedresses, donning slacks more often by the time we were in our teens (when she wasn’t dressed up for her return to work then, a law-office-secretary job that demanded dress, girdle, nylons). Ma always wore a dress or skirt. Pinafore aprons were serious protection against kitchen spatters on clothes that had to be ironed after washing or had to be dry-cleaned.
Is that the difference? Penny and I started out our young-married years well-supplied with aprons, but we usually cooked in jeans and sweatshirts and such. Easily washed, aprons not necessary.
Ma made regular aprons also, with bibs and without. There was one bib style that you didn’t have to pull on over your head (“and muss your perm,” as Penny recalled. Ernie and Ma did have perms). This type was designed with two straps that fastened behind your neck with a button. Ma made bib-less dressy aprons, too; hostess aprons. Penny still has one, in a pattern of roses under an overskirt of see-through chiffon, its chiffon pocket trimmed with the roses fabric.
     The first project in Laconia Junior High home ec’s sewing class was making a placemat and napkin and matching apron. At Baker’s Remnant Store on Main Street, I chose yellow plaid cotton, a sort of gingham. After we students struggled through the ordeal of sewing them, we used them in our cooking classes and, when home ec ended, we took them home. So I had my very own handmade apron for cooking in my mother’s kitchen. When I was sixteen I bought my next aprons, two of them, while buying two uniforms for working at Sawyer’s Dairy Bar. Like the uniforms, the aprons were white nylon. They were small, not quite French-maid style but similar and barely adequate for wiping ice-creamy hands on. The uniforms and aprons accompanied me to my next summer job of waitressing at Keller’s Restaurant on Main Street. When Penny (two years younger) started working summers, she waitressed at an inn that supplied aprons from an assortment from which you picked out your size. We both recall that in order to tie a prettier bow, we put our aprons on backward, tied the bow in front, and spun the aprons around.
     Then came college and those young-married years. Then the middle-age years. Penny and I were always interested in cooking and also in gardening. We canned and froze what we grew, but we can’t remember ourselves even wearing an apron while chopping mountains of vegetables for pickles.
Then, when I was fifty-one (a couple of years older than Penny’s daughter is now), I saw an apron and coveted it. Penny and I were spending three weeks in the Cotswolds, and there in a shop was an apron with scenes of our sightseeing. It cost more than I should’ve spent, but I bought it. And therefore when I got it home I couldn’t simply hang it up to enjoy as a souvenir, I had to use it to justify the expense. So if a meal I’m making is going to be messy, on it goes—and I look down at the scenes and reminisce about the sights and about the food. Bibury . . . that’s where at a tea shop I chose treacle tart with clotted cream . . . 
     And now we have another apron in our household. A year ago Sheena, a Scottish friend, sent us a Christmas present of a “Welcome to Scotland” apron, saying that when she saw it she thought of Don wearing it and me laughing. And so we do!
     In 2007 I wrote a “Ruth’s Neighborhood” piece called “The Winter of Our Comfort Food” about how we’d got through that winter by rediscovering old favorites such as Salmon Wiggle. I’ve suddenly realized that this past winter could be called “Our Cookie Winter.” I didn’t put on an apron and make them, I don’t think I’ve made cookies since circa 1964, and usually we don’t have store-bought cookies around either. Except for company. In January, when friends were coming over for coffee, I got in a bag of the very good chocolate-chip cookies made by Heath’s Supermarket in Center Harbor. As so often happened this winter, a snowstorm caused a cancellation of plans, and there Don and I were with cookies that shouldn’t go to waste. Since then, we’ve been buying a bag a week, and they have helped us through the winter. Sometimes they’re coconut-pecan, but more often they’re chocolate-chip. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.”     
     Speaking of comfort food: on a Maine TV program this winter there was a cooking segment, in which the cook, who’d written a comfort-food cookbook, made macaroni and cheese. She pointed out that originally this wasn’t thought of as comfort food, only an everyday meal. The interviewer asked her for an example of what “old-fashioned comfort food” had been. She replied, “Crackers and milk.” I shrieked with delight—a favorite I haven’t treated myself to in years!
     Did Ma and Ernie put on an apron just to make bowls of crackers and milk? I can’t remember, but I’m betting that Ma did.

© 2014 by Ruth Doan MacDougall;

All rights reserved

OUR GREEN-STONE-RIBBED WORLD

June 30, 2014

This entry was expanded into an illustrated essay in the Literary Pastimes section.

PLAYING TOURIST

October 12, 2014

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