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Author Ruth Doan MacDouigall; books you'll read again and again

Beginning in 2018 "Ruth's Neighborhood" entries were also posted on Ruth's FACEBOOK page where her entries (usually weekly, on Sunday mornings) lead to lively conversations.

This Page: April - June 2025

RECIPES OF RUHAMAH

June 8, 2026

          A dear friend sent me an article from the May 11th issue of THE SEATTLE TIMES: “More Than Mementos: Cherished recipes offer clues to the past” by Providence Cicero. As you can imagine, I was enthralled as I read:
“Cynthia Nims describes herself as ‘a keeper of things.’ Among them are her mother’s recipes, stored in a tattered accordion file held together by packing tape and a prayer . . . As a longtime food writer, magazine editor and the author or co-author of dozens of cookbooks, the lifelong Seattleite has compiled several recipe caches of her own, including her very first, which she also kept in an accordion file. But it’s her mother’s trove that has inspired Nims’ newest venture, Long Live the Recipe Box, an online effort to inspire others to mine cherished recipes for the connections and stories they tell about the past.
“Nearly 25 years after Marion Nims’ death, the contents of her recipe file still fascinate her daughter who can’t bring herself to toss a single recipe.
“‘I see the whole collection as a treasure,’ she says . . .
“Recipe files are like time capsules but also part of a continuum. Whether passed along by relatives, friends, neighbors, coaches or colleagues, recipes show us the way things were, and Nims is on a mission to make sure they are preserved . . .
“She senses a renewed interest in the tangible handwritten recipe and loves to hear that people are creating recipe collections to give as a shower or wedding gift.”
          I’ve been continuing my project of going through acres of paperwork, etc., trying to organize what to keep. A definite keeper is a collection of my favorite recipes I typed up and Don transformed into a booklet with cardboard covers and a two-ring binding. It was a wedding present for Penny. I titled it “Recipes of Ruhamah.” As I’ve mentioned, there was a Ruhamah far back on my mother’s family tree; I was named instead for my Grandmother Ruth but “Ruhamah” became in a way my mother’s nickname for me especially when she needed more than two syllables—“Ruthie!”—to get my attention. Thus the title was a family in-joke, a family amusement.
          Reading the little cookbook I’m back in Lisbon, New Hampshire, where Don and I lived from the summer of 1962 to the summer of 1964 in a rented weathered Cape; bliss, our first house after apartments. In the old kitchen with hardly any countertops I began my years of serious cooking, especially the baking of bread. So the cookbook’s first section is “Breads and Coffee Cakes,” and includes the fun name “Wry Braid” and the exotic thrill of French bread.
          The second section is “Cakes, Cookies, and Desserts”; there are sections devoted to “Dips and Hors d’Oeuvres,” “Chowders,” “Egg and Cheese Dishes”; and eventually “Main Dishes” predominated by canned-soup concoctions. There are many mentions of frugality on a teacher’s salary: instead of Beef Stroganoff I have a recipe for a hot-dog stroganoff, “Frankfurters and Sour Cream,” which Penny and I always laughed about.
          The recipe for “Pate de Foie Gras” is the one I most enjoyed reading, because of my notes to Penny at the end, especially my “P.S.” Heathcliff was our border collie.

PATE DE FOIE GRAS (WITH CHICKEN LIVERS)

1 lb. chicken livers
2 eggs
2 medium-sized onions
2 tablespoons butter
salt and pepper
Drop chicken livers into boiling water seasoned with salt and pepper; simmer until barely done; about ten minutes. Drain them.
Cook eggs until hard; shell them, chop them, and add to livers.
Chop onions coarsely and sauté them in butter.
Chop or blend all these ingredients until they are a fine paste. Season with salt and pepper, and, if you want, with herbs.
NOTES
          • I used only ½ lb. livers and the regular amount of other ingredients; I saved money, and it tasted fine.
         • Don likes a bit of Worcestershire sauce added.
         • This is wonderful in sandwiches with mayonnaise. You can make very fancy crust-less sandwiches if you want to feel Elegant.
         • P.S. Heathcliff loves this, too, and almost broke down the refrigerator door trying to get at it.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

June 1, 2026

          The other day I started laughing after I realized what I’d jotted down on my grocery list: Swiffer Duster refills.
          And I thought of how I had balked when Swiffer Dusters arrived at the supermarket. As I’ve mentioned here before, friends of my generation talk about the frugality instilled in us by our parents, so I call us “Children of the Great Depression.” I had always used rags for dusting and put them in laundry loads and used them again forever; I had a drawer full of rags that I thought of as sort of my version of quilt material, evoking memories, Don’s old T-shirts, my old favorite blue nightie with pink flowers, etc. Why would I use a duster that I couldn’t use forever? A duster that needed refills?
          But eventually I got curious, bought a box—and I haven’t used the rags since. But of course I can’t throw them away, just in case I run out of refills. And I don’t always throw away a dusty, dirty Swiffer; I keep it to use in really dusty places.
          Laughing, I also thought of the scene in OFF SHORE when Snowy discovered a “cute green double boiler” in Mildred’s Cotter Cottage attic. Snowy inspected it “and saw a scorched hole in the lower saucepan ..Being a frugal New Englander, Mildred hadn’t thrown [the double boiler] away; the upper saucepan was still okay and maybe the lower one could be mended. She could imagine Mildred reciting that old saying ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.’”
          My mind next somehow leapt to zucchinis. Waste not, want not! We all know that even a careful, judicious planting will yield more than we can give away. There are those jokes about how you’d better lock your car or someone will leave zucchinis in it. I felt guilty just throwing surplus zucchinis onto the compose pile. Then I read zucchini advice in a gardening column; as the gardener pointed out, zucchini side dishes and bread and muffins hardly made a dent in the zucchini abundance. She advised chopping up lots of zucchinis for the main course, sautéing them with onions and garlic and herbs and whatever else struck your fancy and topping it all with grated cheese. Don and I liked the result. I was canning or freezing everything else in the garden—so because of this zucchini recipe I chopped and froze the extras for winter meals. Frozen and thawed zucchinis are not appetizing. Now, looking back, this seemed, ahem, extreme frugality.
          However, I next thought about Meal-on-Wheels boxes and I felt proud. A couple of friends had mentioned finding that their mothers had saved all the aluminum trays for years. Stacks of them! When I began receiving Meals-on-Wheels deliveries I made myself put the trays in my recycling wastebasket. When the deliveries switched to Styrofoam boxes I consulted our dump manager and he said yes, recycle.           Recycling meant I was doing a good deed. Thus I conquered the urge to save them in a cupboard, just in case. A triumph for a Child of the Great Depression!

DANDELION FESTIVAL

May 25, 2025

               A year ago in April I wrote here:
“Recently when my dear friend Winifred and I were discussing dandelion greens I explained that I’ve never picked or cooked them because Don had dandelion-greens PTSD. In his childhood, he would relate, he had to traipse around lawns after his grandmother, carrying a bag for the millions of dandelion leaves she would harvest. Then came washing them, which took FOREVER. His grandparents and parents lived in the Weirs, the lake-resort section of Laconia, and he could have been SWIMMING.
“Still, he did join me rejoicing at the springtime sight of dandelions and we never tried to rid our lawn of them.”
            I thought of this when I saw a Sandwich Board post, May 10, 2025: “Dandelion Festival, May 17. Saturday afternoon, 2–4 p.m., the Carroll County Beekeepers are hosting a Dandelion Festival in the Grove next to the Wonalancet Chapel. Tasty dandelion snacks! Amy and Ethan Sager will give a brief presentation on soil health, Kathy Goodson will speak on medicinal uses for dandelions and sponsor a plant walk, Bruce Bennett will present on Bee-Hunting using a bee-lining box [I Googled], Gunnar Berg will talk on Dandelion Wine with samples—and lots more! This is a free event open to all.”
            I bet that despite the PTSD Don and I would’ve gone to this festival. Wonalancet is a lovely nearby village.
            Speaking of dandelion wine, I mentioned in my post last year that “One spring I collected (on my own, sparing Don) millions of dandelion blossoms from our lawn and neighbors’ lawns and made dandelion wine.” I used the recipe I’d often seen and wondered about in the little Lend-a-Hand Club cookbook to which my Grandmother Ruth and Lexington friends had contributed, their names beside most recipes. The last two pages have “Old Time Recipes for Home-Made Wines.” No names given. I don’t remember that Grandmother Ruth ever made dandelion wine. But during Prohibition?

Dandelion Wine

2 quarts dandelion blossoms picked when the sun is on them. Pull off the blossoms but do not use any stems. Plunge into boiling water before they are wilted and let them stand 7 hours. Strain, add 2 lemons sliced, 2 oranges sliced, 1 pound raisins chopped, 3 pounds sugar, ½ yeast cake dissolved in warm water. Let this stand 2 weeks in a stone jar, then strain through a fine sieve and then through several thicknesses of cheese cloth. Makes 1 gallon. Bottles do not have to be sealed.

We’re nearing the end of the dandelion season so I should be bidding farewell now. Instead, I’ve been remembering Walt Whitman’s poem of welcome in the little POEMS FOR GARDENERS anthology Penny gave me:

The First Dandelion

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,
As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics,
has ever been,
Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—
Innocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face

GRANITE STATE'S BEST PLACES

May 18, 2025

           In the May issue of NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE the cover story is “Best Places in the Granite State” and the table of contents says, “Looking for an opportunity to get out and explore the Granite State but don’t know where to start? Check out our list of 124 eclectic stops, local treasures, and hidden gems by region.”
          I turned immediately to the article. It starts at the Seacoast region: “With about 18 miles of coastline, New Hampshire has the shortest coastline in the United States. But don’t let that fool you—those 18 miles are saturated with history and surrounded by picturesque towns . . . The Seacoast is packed with things to do, no matter the season.” The places described go from the Hong Asian Noodle Bar in Dover to the glorious Wentworth by the Sea, a huge 150-year-old hotel in New Castle that Penny and I used to gape at during our visits to Rye Harbor.
          And of course this harbor is the highlight of the seacoast to me, Rye Harbor where our grandparents rented a cottage every summer. In SNOWY it became fictional Pevensay, where Snowy and Alan had their first home. The home is fictional but not the nearby jetty of slick black rocks, which Penny and I clambered over and explored.
          Next, the Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee region. I remember places not on the article’s list: visiting the Hood Museum to see one of my father’s manuscripts on display; doing a book signing at the Dartmouth Bookstore. On the article’s list there is Lou’s Restaurant and Bakery. Yes! Don and I had lunch there whenever our timing in Hanover was right.
          Monadnock Region. Keene’s Main Street is on this list, the “famous wide Main Street.” And on that street was Armstrong’s newspaper-store-and-lunch-counter where Don worked part time, bringing home to our married students’ barracks apartment frappes and chopped-ham sandwiches!
Merrimack Valley. On this list is the Ash Street Inn Bed and Breakfast in Manchester. “Originally built in 1885, the inn is a converted Queen Anne Victorian home, perfect for travelers seeking quiet and comfort.” The wonderful New Hampshire Writers’ Project person who phoned to tell me that I would be receiving their 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award recommended the Ash Street Inn. So Don and I stayed there after that ceremony and on another Writers’ Project occasion.
          The White Mountains. “Take a waterfall tour ... One classic New Hampshire outdoor trip is to pack a picnic, take a leisurely hike on a family-friendly trail, and enjoy lunch at one of the state’s many spectacular waterfalls.” The easiest to get to is Sabbaday Falls. The highest, 200 feet, is Arethusa Falls, named for the water nymph in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem.
          The Lakes Region. Ah, my home region. Where to begin? How about the Mt. Washington Scenic Cruise out of Weirs Beach, Laconia: “... take a relaxing scenic tour of Lake Winnipesaukee.” Where to end the day? “The Colonial Theater, Laconia. See concerts, touring performances, speakers and more at this lovingly restored historic theater.” The Colonial inspired the 1950s movie theater in THE CHEERLEADER about which I wrote, “The lobby was long and chilly, the gray floor sloping slowly upward, as if to paradise.”
          And the last region: Great North Woods. For an adventure: “Moose Watching. Gorham Moose Tours operates bus tours from the end of May through mid-September; their wildlife guides will help you safely spot this majestic animal. Farther north, the stretch of Route 3 from Pittsburg north to the Canadian border, known locally as Moose Alley, is your best bet for spotting moose or deer that are crisscrossing the road in search of food and water.”
I would add that you could also climb a far-north mountain, as Don and I did when I put it in 50 MORE HIKES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, Mount Magalloway. I wrote, “Growing up in Orford on the Connecticut River, Dan was fascinated by the river’s history. Later he spent much time exploring its headwaters in the Pittsburg area and eventually he wrote INDIAN STREAM REPUBLIC: SETTLING A NEW ENGLAND FRONTIER, 1785–1842 . . . Mount Magalloway, elevation 3,383 feet, named after the river beyond the mountain, gives you wilderness views into Canada, Vermont, and Maine, along with New Hampshire. The hike itself is short and easy, but the trip north can seem almost as much of an adventure as it was for the Indian Stream settlers.”
At Girls’ State in 1956 we learned the New Hampshire State Song and I find myself humming it now:
Old New Hampshire, old New Hampshire,
Old New Hampshire grand and great.
We will sing of Old New Hampshire,
Of the dear old Granite State.

MAY 2025 SANDWICH BOARD

May 11, 2025

In April there were Sandwich Board posts announcing the arrival of hummingbirds in Sandwich. Then came this one:

May 1: Day, May Day. The first hummingbird arrived today up here in the high altitude (1350) part of Sandwich. This is the earliest arrival date I have recorded in 45 years of keeping track—by about a week. Must mean something—hope it’s not dire. Happy to have them return.

MAINE SEAWEED WEEK

May 4, 2025

          In A BORN MANIAC, during their courtship Puddles says to Blivit, “Damnit, do you want to continue with—with us, whatever it is?” When he nods she says, “Then what we’ve got to do is get the hell away from here. Let’s go someplace that’ll be new to both of us.” He says, “Grand Manan. We’ll go there.” She asks, “What and where is Grand Manan?”
“It’s another island. But in Canada. Aunt Izzy’s been after me to check out dulse processing there, one of her ideas for the cannery building.”
“Dulse? Isn’t dulse the dried seaweed that people eat?”
“Apparently Grand Manan is the dulse capital of the world.”
          Over the years before Don and I visited his Great-uncle Frank (whom Don had last met at age five) and Canadian wife Ethel (Frank was her second husband) on Grand Manan in 1987, I had read about dulse and seen it in whole foods stores but hadn’t bought it because of salt and Don’s heart problems. On Grand Manan we tasted dulse. According to my Grand Manan journal, “Ethel brought from the kitchen a tin for us to sample. Don didn’t like it but was of course polite; I of course liked it.”
           After our visit with Frank and Ethel, before we returned to our motel we got to the Grand Harbour Museum just before it closed for the day. There we “saw a photograph of Willa Cather on a wall and a sign saying, ‘On this desk Willa Cather typed the manuscript for several of her famous novels at Whale Cove, Grand Manan.’ The ‘desk’ is very small table, hardly big enough to hold the little old-fashioned typewriter.”
I thought of Grand Manan and Puddles and Blivit when I had seen on Maine TV a news item about Maine Seaweed Week, April 25–May 4.
           Then I Googled. The Maine Seaweed Week website is great, complete with recipes! I learned that this is the “7th Annual Food & Drink Festival Celebrating Maine’s Seaweed Harvest. Join us for the largest seafood food and drink festival in North America!” How had I missed news about the six previous festivals?
“Join us for a seaweed-centered celebration across the State! Think kelp burgers, seaweed beer and cocktails, and everything in between at your favorite local bars and restaurants. Plus, hands-on events like seaweed ID workshops, cooking classes, and Seaweed Saturday—our one-of-a-kind seaweed expo—all brought to you by Maine’s seaweed experts.”
           There are lists of “Restaurants, Bars, and Bites” and “Makers and Retailers.” Items on the “Maine-Based Makers” list include seaweed lip balm, face mask, and body oil; kelp pizza dough; award-winning rockweed cheese; Maine oyster and seaweed chowder; pistachio kelp fudge.
          The “Recipes from Maine’s Seaweed Experts” section begins, “Among these pages you’ll find recipes like kelp ribollita, dulse and avocado salad, seaweed corn chowder, crunchy chicken and fermented seaweed salad, spicy kelp cornbread muffins, 5-minute miso soups, and more!” The recipe that most appealed to me had been in a March 2014 issue of DOWN EAST magazine, from the SEA VEGETABLE CELEBRATION cookbook by Shep Erhart and Leslie Cerier, with a photo of a bowlful.

New England Dulse Chowder
Serves 4

1 cup water
1 medium onion, diced
2-3 medium potatoes, chopped
1 ounce dulse
½ lb. fresh or frozen corn
1 quart plain soymilk (not lite)
White or yellow miso, to taste
Black pepper, to taste
¼ to ½ teaspoon tarragon (optional)
In medium pot, bring 1 cup water to a boil. Add diced onion, then potatoes. Cook 5-10 minutes. Add the dulse and corn and cook for 1 minute. Add soymilk and reduce heat to a simmer (do not boil the soymilk or it will curdle). Stir occasionally. The dulse will separate into pieces after a few minutes. Add miso, pepper, and serve.

          When Blivit and Puddles arrive at a (fictional) Grand Manan inn, Puddles, who does not want to dine on dulse and wants to be forewarned, asks the woman at the reception desk, “Do you serve dulse?”
           The woman laughs merrily. “We tell people we have to track down dulse and beat it to death, that’s what turns it purple.”
           A joke Don and I heard on Grand Manan!

POEMS & TEARS & LAUGHTER

April 27, 2025

          Last week I decided to reacquaint myself with the National Poetry Month posts I’ve done in the past. The one for April 20, 2016 intrigued me:

“A while ago when I wrote here about houseplants and quoted from Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar,’ I looked up the quote in my favorite anthology to make sure I’d got it right and as I did so I was amused to realize that I wouldn’t just check that one Tennyson poem. I would turn to his ‘Ulysses’ and inevitably I would start crying when I reached ‘Come, my friends,/Tis not too late to seek a newer world.’ Why would I deliberately reread a poem that I knew would make me cry?
“Well, now it’s April, National Poetry Month, and I’m trying to answer the question. In ‘Ulysses” the words and meter are irresistible: ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:/It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.’ They demand rereading through the years. And each rereading recaptures the wonder of the first discovery. If we had read it first in our youth (as we are wont to do with poetry), we recapture our youth.
          That helps to set off the tears?
“What other poems automatically do this to me? The first that come immediately to mind are A. E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees,’ Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier,’ Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘The Goose Girl’:

                    Spring rides no horses down the hill,
                    But comes on foot, a goose-girl still.
                    And all the loveliest things there be
                    Come simply, so, it seems to me . . .

“Okay, what about laughs? While looking something up in an anthology or just browsing, what poems do I stop at, knowing they’ll make me laugh? The first that come to mind again include Housman, ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.’ Then there’s E. B. White’s ingenious rhyming of ‘narcissus’ in every verse of ‘Window Ledge in the Atom Age,’ especially ‘I love the missus.’ In my teens I spent a lot of time in my parents’ collections of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash, laughing. Don still recalls my quoting Dorothy Parker to him: ‘But say my verses do not scan/And I get me another man!’ In April when ducks are returning to our lakes and ponds, whenever I see one feeding I always quote Ogden Nash on the subject of ducks: ‘When it sups/It bottoms ups.’”

And now in April 2025 I’ve recently been laughing with limericks. A dear friend quoted over the phone to me:

An epicure dining at Crewe
Found quite a large mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter, “Don’t shout
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one, too.”

In reply I quoted my favorite limerick, slightly risqué. Don and I heard it long ago on a Hogmanay show on British radio:

There was a young Scotsman named Andy
Who went into a pub for a shandy.
He lifted his kilt
To wipe what he’d spilt,
And the barmaid said, “Blimey, that’s handy!”

POEMS AND PICNICS

April 20, 2025

Recently within three days while doing errands Wanda and I had the treat of two car picnics—with two views of Lake Winnipesaukee.

For the first, from the Meredith McDonald’s we took our chicken nuggets down to the bay and parked in the town-docks spaces. We laughed about how after the Memorial Day long weekend (“the unofficial start of summer”) this would be impossible; no empty spaces again until after Labor Day. We marveled over how it seemed only yesterday that the bay was frozen and folks were ice-fishing. We gazed at Winnipesaukee.
I like my nuggets plain and Wanda had sauce with hers. Sauces! As I’ve mentioned in past Aprils, during National Poetry Month the local Yeoman’s Fund for the Arts posts a daily poem on the Sandwich Board; one of them this year is “Song to Barbecue Sauce” by Roy Blount, Jr.:

Hot and sweet and red and greasy,
I could eat a gallon easy:
Barbecue sauce!
Lay it on, hoss.

Nothing is dross
Under barbecue sauce.

Brush it on chicken, slosh it on pork,
Eat it with fingers, not with a fork.
I could eat barbecued turtle or squash—
I could eat tar paper cooked and awash
In barbecue sauce.

I’d eat Spanish moss
With barbecue sauce.

Hear this from Evelyn Billiken Husky,
Formerly Evelyn B. of Sandusky:
“Ever since locating down in the South
I have had barbecue sauce on my mouth.”

Nothing can gloss
Over barbecue sauce.

For the second car picnic Wanda and I were in Wolfeboro. After we stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts and got an egg-and-cheese sandwich (Wanda) and a bagel oozing cream cheese (me), Wanda drove us over to another pre-Memorial-Day empty parking area for a lake view. We looked back across Winnipesaukee to the mountain range near Laconia. There was Belknap Mountain, the first mountain I climbed; that is, as I’ve mentioned here before, I was carried by my father while Penny rode in his wicker pack basket.

Enjoying the bagel, I remembered picnic lunches on hikes—and Canada jays, who are gray, not blue. Once in a while when we Over-the-Hill Hikers settled down on a summit and took our lunches out of our packs, we had to guard our food from these fine-feathered-friends who are nicknamed “camp robbers.”
Wanda and I were safe from Canada jays during our car picnics!

POETRY BOOKCASE

April 13, 2025

When we moved into this house in 1976 it was a shell. Don got so busy making the downstairs a home that we declared the entire upstairs my garret office and left it as is. A few years later he had time to turn his attention to it but by then I was ensconced under the eaves with my big Steelcase desk and big filing cabinets, etc., etc. Thus we continued to leave it as is.

However, I was using cartons, stacked on their sides, for bookcases. In our previous house the main bookshelves were built-in and they stayed when we left. So Don now built bookcases. He made five fine-furniture bookcases; these were for novels. He assembled other bookcases from Staples kits. We acquired a bookcase from a secondhand store and he painted it green, my favorite color. It became the Poetry Bookcase. On top of it I propped a little painting I’d done, my one and only painting, using Don’s paint and palette knife, applying the paint as if I were frosting a cake: yellow balloons against a green background; I called it “Springtime.”

Nowadays I’m unable to climb the stairs so my Steelcase desk has been moved downstairs along with one of the fine-furniture bookcases. The books that have come downstairs include favorite poetry collections and anthologies. And in National Poetry Month I’ve been picturing the Poetry Bookcase upstairs and remembering Don’s favorite poems. One of them is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” full of Larkin’s rollicking use of “the F-word,” and the other is A. E. Housman’s “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff”:

. . . Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer;
Then the world seemed none so bad
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky;
Heighho the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing more remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good . . .

While I’ve been working on my project of organizing folders and piles of papers, I’ve come upon yearbooks. One of them is ECHO, the 1964 Senior Class of Lisbon (New Hampshire) High School yearbook, which had been dedicated to Don, their English teacher and yearbook advisor. (He had also been the editor of his Laconia High School yearbook!) He was asked to write some words of wisdom to put under his photograph on the dedication page. We decided to have Housman speak for him. And there in the front pages of the Lisbon yearbook is Don sitting at his desk, smiling rather quizzically across the quotation below: “Therefore, since the world has still . . . train for ill and not for good.”
We moved to England that summer and stayed two years. We of course visited Ludlow—but because of timing we couldn’t go during the fair.

MUD-LUSCIOUS

April 6, 2025

          In March folks start talking ruefully about “the fifth season”: mud season. Warnings remind us to be careful, to stay off dirt roads. Yes! When Wanda and I are doing errands we don’t take the dirt-roads shortcuts to the main road; we take the long way around on paved roads. I remember one spring when Don and I were young and brave and taking our usual scenic route from Sandwich to nearby Tamworth over a covered bridge, onto a dirt road. Don suddenly stopped the car, got out, and walked forward, testing the ground. He said, “Nope!” (more colorfully) and we turned back.
          The Sandwich Board and the Meredith newspaper had this March announcement: “Mud Season Trail Update. Each year the Squam Lakes Association, in conjunction with landowners who allow public access to their land, temporarily closes sensitive trails around Squam. As the snow melts, muddy conditions force hikers to move off the trails onto the softer ground on the side. This loosens rocks, weakens trees, and creates erosion. In order to protect the network, please avoid hiking on closed trails until we reopen them when conditions dry up!
          “The following trails are CLOSED as of 3/21: Rattlesnake network, Squam Range, Mt. Morgan Trail, Mt. Percival Trail, Crawford Ridgepole Trail, and Cotton Mountain Trail.
          “Here are some alternative hikes that are OPEN while you wait: Belknap Woods, Whitten Woods, Chamberlain Reynolds Memorial Forest, Red Hill, Castle in the Clouds.”
          When I read the trail names, full of memories, they seemed like poetry to me. And now it’s April, National Poetry Month, and I’m thinking of the mud in e.e. cummings’s “Chanson Innocente.” As I’ve mentioned here before, Don and I always reread and recited this poem during mud season, laughing:

In just —
Spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloon-man

whistles far and wee.

And eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring,

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloon-man whistles
far and we
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
       spring
                and
                        the
                                goat-footed
balloon-man     whistles
far
and
wee

Archive of Past Entries

Each year's entries are grouped by quarter; i.e., three months per page. The page you are viewing is the current quarter; once all entries for this quarter are set on a page, that "current page" will become an "archived entries page" and will appear in the listing below.

The entries below predate Ruth's transferring her use of Facebook. They appeared as very occasional opportunities to share what was of interest to her in and around her neighborhood.

2014 - 2017

Book Reviewing
April Flowers
April Snowstorm
Restoring the Colonial Theater
Reunion at Sawyer's Dairy Bar
Going to the Dump
Desks
A Curmudgeon's Lament
Aprons
Our Green-and-Stone-Ribbed World
Playing Tourist

2012-2013

Sawyer's Dairy Bar
Why Climb a MountIn
Penny'S Cats
Favorite Books
Marion's Christmas Snowball
Robin Summer
Niobe
Mother West Wind
Neighborhood Stoves

2008 - 2011

The Lot
Mother Goose
Colonial Theater
Aeons of Ironing
Our Canterbury Tale
Love it Here
Children of the Great Depression
Loads of Laundry

2004 - 2007

The Winter of Our Comfort Food
Rebuilding the Daniel Doan Trail
My Husband Is In Love with Margaret Warner
Chair Caning
The End of Our Rope
The Weirs
Frost Heaves
Where In the World is Esther Williams
The Toolshed
Sandwich Bar Parade
Lawns

2000-2003

That'll Do
Chipmunks and Peepers
A Fed Bear
Laconia HS 45th Reunion
Birdbrains
Drought
Friends
Wild Turkeys
Meadowbrook Salon
Lunch on the Porch
Damn Ice
A Male Milestone

1998-1999

Y2K
Fifties Diner
Glorious Garlic
Celebrated Jumping Chipmunk
Going Up Brook
Mud Season
BRR!
Vacation in Maine
Trip to Lancaster/Lisbon NH
Overnight Hike to Gordon Pond
Big Chill Reunion
Backyard Wildlife

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