Summer in New Hampshire

"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -- Robert Frost

It's an odd thing to live in such a northern state, bordering Canada and Maine, and yet to feel each July and August like you'd accidentally woken up in a Louisiana swamp. The heat never reaches much beyond 90 degrees -- although a few days in the 100+ degrees zone isn't too unusual -- but still, somehow the humidity just rings the life out of you. You expect to see Spanish moss hanging from the birch trees.

But alas, one cannot whine too much. The field flowers here in New Hampshire are stunningly beautiful, with black-eyed susans, lilies and so many other local natives making the many fields and roadside ditches an explosion of color. When I was younger I rarely noticed flowers, but nowadays they add so much to life. Of course, as my father likes to say, it's always a good thing to wake up on the right side of the flowers, still able to enjoy them.

More colorful observations to come soon.

The Boston Bombings

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

- Robert Frost

Massachusetts and New Hampshire do not always get along. To those in Massachusetts, New Hampshirites are hicks and anything north of the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border is considered exactly like deepest, darkest Africa. Nice maple syrup, beautiful fall foliage, but utterly lacking anything in the way of civilization. In response, New Hampshirites have invented a term to describe their southern New England neighbors: Massh*les. Massachusetts had its Puritans but New Hampshire was historically a great mixture of religions, and some fleeing persecution by Puritan extremists made their way to the great New Hampshire wilderness. Add in New Hampshire's 0% sales tax, which means that a lot of Massachusetts people do their shopping just across the border, and, well, let me tell you what it's like getting a parking space in southern NH. Feeling the love?

In truth, however, the two states are joined at the hip. Many New Hampshirites work in Massachusetts, particularly in Boston. I myself was in Copley Square in Boston with some New Hampshire-based colleagues on business just a week before the Marathon - a not uncommon circumstance. Indeed, Boston is really the unofficial capital of New England, and the entire region - New Hampshire included - looks to Boston's news, economy and sports teams for inspiration. As I've noted once before on this blog, dissing the Red Sox in a bar anywhere in New Hampshire will earn you a fat lip as surely as if you were in Boston. Ask just about any New Hampshirite to meet you in Boston, and they'll show up at any street corner, park, bar or subway stop in the city without checking a map.

In turn, New Hampshire has traditionally served as vacation central for Mass*les, so that many Massachusetts citizens have childhood memories filled with summer camps in New Hampshire's Lakes region. In the summer, New Hampshire's slim coastline is chock full of Massachusetts people who seek the sandy (and cheaper) beaches, while during the autumn northern New Hampshire is just as filled with Massachusetts tourists and their cameras, soaking in the explosion of colors in scenic small New Hampshire towns. People like Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and the late comedian George Carlin all grew up spending summers in New Hampshire, so that while they may not admit it, most Massachusetts people have fond memories of this state.

This close relationship between these two New England sibling states became apparent when the bombs went off in Boston during the Boston Marathon last week. The news rippled across both states quickly and on both sides of the border, people were making frantic calls to find relatives known to be in or watching the race. Emergency personnel from both states also quickly responded, and New Hampshire police and fire people were present in Watertown when the second suspect was finally apprehended. Here in New Hampshire this week, you can't poke your head out the window without seeing some sort of fund raiser for the bombing victims, and "Boston Strong" shirts, signs and bumper stickers are everywhere.

This doesn't mean that we still won't shake our fists at deranged Massh*le drivers - and all drivers from Massachusetts are mentally deranged, which no doubt has been proven in countless scientific studies - but in the end, when the chips are down, we're like the family you can't choose and we do the right thing.

Spring in New Hampshire

My father has this annoying little ditty that he feels compelled to repeat each spring:

"Spring has sprung, the grass is rise, I wonder where all the flowers is?"

This, apparently, encapsulates the total wisdom my family has accumulated over the ages, to be passed down from generation to generation. So as my grandfather annoyed my father with this, so too, in the timeless way of generational baton passing, must my father regale me with this gem - accompanied, of course, by a few uncontrollable chuckles and snarfs. We live hundreds of miles apart nowadays, but the wonders of modern technology make it very easy for my father to nevertheless carry on this tradition. The phone rings, I see the number on the caller ID, and it's roughly April, so I know it's coming. Alas, who am I stand in the way of family heirlooms? I answer, and grimace.

But it is indeed spring, and things are indeed springing, including the crocuses in my front garden. These little guys are pretty hearty, having poked up a bit early only to endure a thick frost for the effort. I also note the irises are coming up as well, though they haven't flowered yet. (I'm completely sympathetic. I myself am a wake-up-at-the-crack-of-noon type of guy.) All of this is to say that with spring and new beginnings, I want to take this long-neglected blog in a new direction. I am going to take some of Robert Frost's poetry on a regular basis and use it as inspiration to talk about some aspect of life in these New Hampshires. Now, I am not an English major so don't expect some deep analysis about how Frost used mackerel as a symbol for his sexual frustration or anything like that; I'll just use it as a starting point to wander off and talk about some interesting tidbit about New Hampshire that I've noticed. Frost is ideal for this kind of thing because, well, I just plain enjoy his poetry, but also because Frost himself was really an urbanized southern New Englander who tried hard to become a rural New Hampshirite. His quest to fit in to the unique culture of this state included, according to the guides at the museum in his former farm in Derry, NH, secretly listening in to his neighbors' party phone line conversations for hours to try to nail down the New Hampshire accent. So I sympathize with Frost; I love this state and call it home, but will never be a true "native." (Frost, BTW, eventually moved to Vermont. Quitter.)

So that's the plan. I'll give it a whirl, and see if I end up having my home fire bombed by horrified English teachers or if I'll be sued by Frost's surviving relatives.

Pass the Mint Julip?

A Christmas Song Can't Be Wrong, Can It?

There is a side to New Hampshire that really is like what you see in the popular Yankee magazine or Yankee Candle and all that very romanticized, sentimental New England stuff. Christmas is a HUGE deal up here in New Hampshire, and New Hampshirites take their Christmas decorating very seriously. (Check out this video from the local news that made big headlines when someone swiped an inflatable Santa from a New Hampshirite's front lawn.) Imagine my surprise then, given all this, when my wife decides to roast some chestnuts and our neighbors looked at us like we offered them some nummy squirrel brains. Now, as a wee lad, my father used to get me a small white paper cup of roasted chestnuts from corner street vendors in the main town for our region of New York state, and I know years later you could still buy the same on the streets of New York City itself, although admittedly, there the chestnuts tended to have a carbon monoxide flavor, courtesy of the buses and yellow cabs. I mean, come on people, even Wayne Newton sang about roasted chestnuts by the fireside! Chestnut trees are native to New Hampshire, although a blight many years ago put a big dent in their numbers. A few weeks ago while in Portsmouth on the ocean, we watched a couple collecting their own scallops and shucking them by the dock; what's so strange about picking up chestnuts and roasting them? You'd think a tradition-crazed state like NH would be all over the roasted chestnuts thing, but no, I'm afraid roasted chestnuts in New Hampshire have been surpassed as a Christmas tradition by the likes of marshmellow peeps. In a futile attempt to restart a good old tradition, I offer this page for a recipe. Enjoy.

New Hampshire = Not Summer

We really do have summer in NH. Sometimes. Well, for about 3 months each year. But in those three months it can get downright hot here, and with the nearby ocean you also get hyper-humid air, which mixes nicely with the often 90 degrees + temps to cook us like lobstahs. This is why getting a spot on the Hampton beaches during those months is as iffy as cell phone coverage in NH. This year June was extremely rainy and New Hampshirites went around complaining they had fungus growing in their armpits, but then came July and the killer heat. The fungus went away, but so did about two-thirds of our bodies' water mass. A surprisingly large proportion of New Hampshirites still have an English ancestry, so what you got here in July and August was a bunch of embarrassingly pasty-white, sweaty and dehydrated -- and irate -- Yankees.

But alas, those days are behind us and we can go back to our tweads and wool sweaters. We have entered that season in New Hampshire known as "non-summer". There are two other seasons, spring and autumn, but those both last about twenty minutes each. Sometime after August, you'll just hear a popping noise outside and if you're quick enough to run to a nearby window, you'll see the trees have all changed colors and dropped their leaves in one dramatic gesture. It's very pretty, but you have to be quick. Once the leaves have hit the ground, the scenery changes from stunning reds, oranges and yellows to a sort of brown-gray hybrid. That's the official color of non-summer, a dull non-ending streak of of brown-gray that uniformly wraps the landscape with the exception of the many evergreen trees, but even they try their best to blend into the scenery, at least as we get closer to Christmas.

Anyway, we have entered that part of the year -- lasting some eight months, give or take -- called non-summer here in New Hampshire but non-summer has a surprise it likes to spring on you. (No pun intended there.) Non-summer is allowed, just about any time it wants, from its inception in September until May, to suddenly and inexplicably dump lots of white stuff on us. That's right, non-summer is snow season, and it is going to make that point again this week -- just before Halloween -- when even here in southern NH, we're expecting 2-4 inches. This time non-summer has been nice enough to give us a little heads up (via the local news, WMUR), which provokes a mad rush to get porch plants and garden hoses indoors, but there have been a few times when we were caught off guard, with unpleasant consequences. That mad scramble is upon us now, so if you'll excuse me, I have to go find the car window scrapers in the basement.

Spring in New Hampshire

It is early May and I can finally say with certainty that the snow is gone. We did have a snowstorm in later April that dumped several inches of the white stuff on us, but it didn't stick around long. Now, flowers are blooming, the trees are green, the Merrimack River is bulging with melted snow and spring showers, the Forsythia bushes are screaming bright yellow, and I've been squawked at by the blue jays who have moved back into our yard. I know parts of the country to the west have gotten more than their fair share of rain recently, but our rainy days have been interpolated by enough dry, sunny days over the past few weeks that even our bedrock-ridden granite surface ground has been able to soak it all up. There was some flooding up in the northern-most counties where snow was still a couple feet deep in the mountains but for the most part, this New Hampshire spring has been decidedly pleasant. In fact, for the first time since I've moved here, I've repeatedly seen a rainbow out my home office window. Not a bad start to the year, and we're looking forward to our first warm-weather outing to the coast. Portsmouth, here we come!