After a fire devastated a small New Hampshire farm, neighbors came together to keep the owners’ dream alive.
new hampshire
Magazine
Anatomy of a Story
Every good story I have ever read, or written, always starts the same way: with curiosity. Without an intense need to ask questions, to understand, to know the lives of others, there may well be words on a page, but I doubt they would resonate with readers. “Fire on the Farm” — my column in […]
Magazine
Sneak Peek at the Spring Issue
Yankee‘s spring issue (March/April) leaves our Dublin, N.H., offices soon, on its way to the printing plant where in the next few weeks the intricate process of getting a magazine printed, bound, and on its way to readers takes place. This is a sneak peek. Of course I am close to the contents since I […]
Magazine
Questions from Readers
New. A New Year. A New Yankee. What is not new is that Yankee‘s readers care. Big time. For the past few days my phone here has been ringing off the hook with loyal, faithful, readers, many of whom feel their longtime friend, Yankee Magazine, has gone away. At the moment, I am not their […]
MANY YEARS AGO, a member of the Grange in Brattleboro, Vermont, told me proudly that from the program of recycling hearing-aid batteries, the Grange had raised about $70 for its scholarship program. “You mean you personally raised seventy dollars for the Brattleboro Grange by recycling hearing-aid batteries?” I asked. “Heavens, no,” he replied. “I mean […]
In this column last February, I recalled my old friend and barber, Bill Austin, telling me a joke I might use in a forthcoming speech I was to make at the local Women’s Club and assuring me that, no, I needn’t worry. It was clean. In fact, he said, it was so clean “you could […]
1. Were “spring dance floors” built to spring? 2. Where, exactly, does “down east” begin? 3. Why were bridges covered? WELL, LET’S BEGIN with the term “down east.” We all know it’s a nautical way of referring to sailing with the wind or down wind when traveling northeast off the Maine coast. Where down east […]
EVERY REGION HAS certain words that reflect its history, its geography — and its personality. For instance, Southerners seem to me to be immediately open and friendly, even with total strangers. “Y’all come!” they’ll say, which would appear to include mankind. We New Englanders are more reserved about extending invitations, or anything else, and our […]
History
It’s Fun to Believe in Ghosts
NEW ENGLANDERS WANT to believe in ghosts — and we have so many of them — but we’re often too practical and hardheaded to believe in anything we haven’t seen or heard. There’s the old story, for example, of the New Hampshire farmer who was cornered by a scholar researching New England religious history. The […]
THERE SEEM TO be certain New England legends that evolve out of no logical sequence of events at all. Merely a little something someone said can catch our imagination, be repeated and perhaps somewhat embellished, and eventually … voila! It takes its place among the New England legends we love. There are dozens of examples […]
Oh, sure, people in the states of Delaware and Indiana still think Uncle Sam was a Sam Wilson, born in Wilmington, Delaware, and buried in Merriam, Indiana. But in the 1960s, even the United States Congress recognized the New England-born Samuel Wilson as the Uncle Sam. And, as is the case in so many so-called […]
Not long ago, while watching from my office window the fireman putting up lights on the town Christmas tree here in Dublin, New Hampshire, I began wondering if perhaps New England might lay claim to the very first Christmas tree. Well, the first American Christmas tree. (It is well established that the use of the […]