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CONTENTS

The New England Aquarium may be the home of some 20,000 animals, but for Myrtle the Turtle, it’s more of a royal domain. Story, p. 100.

features 88 /// The Holiday Bucket List From downtown celebrations to sparkling light shows and festive eats, New England has a multitude of merry ways to ring in the season. Time to get Nutcracking!

108 /// Their Voices Carry Far

100 /// Queen of the Deep Generations of New Englanders know Myrtle the Turtle as an aquarium celebrity. For some, she’s also a timeless comfort in a turbulent world. By Joe Keohane

114 /// Running with Rollie A returning soldier. An abandoned dog. Together, they would run all the way home. By Emily Bradley

Santa mouse needle-felted in wool by Danielle Sadowski of Farmhouse Felts. Photograph by Linda Campos

118 /// Conversations: Jill Lepore The acclaimed Massachusetts writer and historian on why the study of our nation’s history is so important— and why it’s such hard work. Interview by Joe Keohane

Yankee (ISSN 0044-0191). Bimonthly, Vol. 85 No. 6. Publication Office, Dublin, NH 03444-0520. Periodicals postage paid at Dublin, NH, and additional offices. Copyright 2021 by Yankee Publishing Incorporated; all rights reserved. Postmaster: Send address changes to Yankee, P.O. Box 37128, Boone, IA 50037-0128.

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BRIAN SKERRY

ON THE COVER

By bringing together young immigrants in song, this Maine chorus offers a life-changing experience for performers and audience alike. By Mel Allen

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More Contents

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DEAR YANKEE, CONTRIBUTORS & POETRY BY D.A.W.

26 /// Kindred Spirits

12 INSIDE YANKEE

Holiday decorating is all in the family for two sisters whose homes are deeply rooted in place and history. By Mel Allen

14 FIRST PERSON How an act of kindness led to an unforgettable gift. By Mel Allen

34 /// Open Studio

Massachusetts fiber artist Danielle Sadowski crafts a menagerie to inspire seasonal delight. By Annie Graves

Horse lovers, this New Hampshire farm with a dramatic Derby backstory could be yours. By Joe Bills

FIRST LIGHT Started as a holiday boost, a big-hearted community meals project in small-town Vermont is putting down some permanent roots. By Ian Aldrich

food

20 WEEKENDS WITH YANKEE Q&A Catching up with TJ Douglas, a game-changing Boston wine expert and Weekends with Yankee guest. By Amy Traverso

44 /// Buon Appetito!

Yankee senior food editor Amy Traverso shares recipes from her family’s “Italian-ish” holiday traditions.

55 /// The 2021 Yankee Food Awards Celebrating the makers of the best New England artisan foods, all delivered right to your doorstep. By Amy Traverso, Aimee Tucker, and Katherine Keenan

64 /// Recipe Classic First published in Yankee almost a decade ago, this turkey recipe has earned its place at the Thanksgiving table. By Amy Traverso

144 LIFE IN THE KINGDOM A meditation on the necessity of building a home for the wood that heats yours. By Ben Hewitt

travel 72 /// Weekend Away

History, culture, hip shopping, and food for all tastes make Providence, Rhode Island, a great under-the-radar winter getaway. By Ann Hood

80 /// The Best 5 These independent toy stores are at the top of their game. By Kim Knox Beckius 86 /// Handcrafted Holidays We round up favorite New England craft fairs and artisan galleries for one-of-a-kind gifts. 4 |

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UP CLOSE At the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, the Nativity story yields an unforgettable work of art. By Joe Bills

ADVERTISING RESOURCES Weekends with Yankee.......... 23 My New England............... 42 The Vermont Country Store’s 75th Anniversary..................62 Holiday Gift Guide............ 66 New England Shop..........126 Retirement Living............ 133 Marketplace.......................138

L I N DA C A M P O S (S Q U I R R E L S) ; B R I A N S A M U E L S ( P O R T R A I T ) ; A N G E L T U C K E R (SK AT I N G)

38 /// House for Sale

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EDITORIAL Editor Mel Allen Managing Editor Jenn Johnson Senior Features Editor Ian Aldrich Senior Food Editor Amy Traverso Home & Garden Editor Annie Graves Associate Editor Joe Bills Senior Digital Editor Aimee Tucker Associate Digital Editor Katherine Keenan Contributing Editors Kim Knox Beckius, Sara Anne Donnelly, Ben Hewitt, Rowan Jacobsen, Nina MacLaughlin, Julia Shipley ART Art Director Katharine Van Itallie Photo Editor Heather Marcus Contributing Photographers Adam DeTour, Megan Haley, Corey Hendrickson, Michael Piazza, Greta Rybus

Publisher Brook Holmberg ADVERTISING Vice President Judson D. Hale Jr. Media Account Managers Kelly Moores, Dean DeLuca, Steven Hall Canada Account Manager Cynthia Fleming Senior Production Coordinator Janet Selle For advertising rates and information, call 800-736-1100, ext. 204, or email NewEngland.com/adinfo. MARKETING ADVERTISING

Director Kate Hathaway Weeks Manager Valerie Lithgow Specialist Holly Sloane PUBLIC RELATIONS

PRODUCTION Director David Ziarnowski Manager Brian Johnson Senior Artists Jennifer Freeman, Rachel Kipka DIGITAL Vice President Paul Belliveau Jr. Senior Designer Amy O’Brien Ecommerce Director Alan Henning Marketing Specialist Holly Sanderson Email Marketing Specialist Samantha Caveny — YANKEE PUBLISHING INC. ESTABLISHED 1935 | AN EMPLOYEE-OWNED COMPANY

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Use our Instagram hashtag #mynewengland for a chance to be featured in an upcoming issue!

M U S T-T R Y H O L I D AY R E C I P E S ’Tis the season for baking, roasting, mulling, and more—and we’ve got you covered with the best holiday recipes from our archives. Whether you’re hunting for Thanksgiving essentials, classic cookies, or home-baked gifts, find delicious inspiration at: newengland.com/holiday-recipes FO L L OW US O N S O C I A L M E D I A @YA N K E E M AGA Z IN E

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LE T TERS TO THE EDITOR

High Point

CONTRIBUTORS

ANN HOOD A dyed-in-the-wool Rhode Islander who grew up in West Warwick, Hood now lives part-time in Providence, for which she shares an insider’s guide in “Weekend Away” [p. 72]. The author of such best-selling novels as The Obituary Writer and The Book That Matters Most, Hood draws from an unusual chapter in her life for her forthcoming memoir, Fly Girl: the eight years she spent working as a flight attendant for TWA. LINDA CAMPOS Though she originally moved from her home state of Texas to Boston to study classical music, Campos soon fell in love with photography, and today she fields assignments from the likes of Travel + Leisure, Dwell, and Real Simple. She says of her “Open Studio” subject, Massachusetts artist Danielle Sadowski [p. 34]: “The way she transforms wool felt into lifelike animals is really incredible. I could have watched her crafting new projects for days!” JULIA EMILIANI Of the many cheery, colorful illustrations Emiliani created for “The Holiday Bucket List” [p. 88], her regional map of light shows had special resonance “because it expressed the fondness I feel toward New England, a place I’ve lived in for the majority of my life.” When not making art, she can be found tending to her plants, trying out new recipes, or walking the bike path in Somerville, Massachusetts. For more of her work, check out @juliaemiliani on Instagram. JOE KEOHANE After hanging out with a wizened sea turtle [“Queen of the Deep,” p. 100], chatting with historian Jill Lepore [“Conversations,” p. 118], and publishing his first book, The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World (Random House), this writer, editor, and Boston-area native officially becomes a multitasking hero by starring in our upcoming webinar, “Conversations with Yankee” (details at newengland.com/conversationsyankee). KINDRA CLINEFF An editorial, lifestyle, and travel photographer whose work calls for traveling extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, Clineff comes home in this issue in more ways than one [“Kindred Spirits,” p. 26]. “From lusting after Yankee’s ‘House for Sale’ listings as a kid to owning a First Period home in Massachusetts—a love I share with my sister—having my and my sister’s homes appear in Yankee brings me full circle,” she says. E M I LY B R A D L E Y Nothing could be more poignant than this New Hampshire writer’s essay, “Running with Rollie,” about her husband, Jeff, and his dog (which you should read, right now, by going to p. 114), except for its unwritten coda. Near the end of Rollie’s life, the couple learned they were pregnant with their first child, Bradley says. “I believe Rollie stayed around until he knew Jeff would have someone else to run with. Jeff now runs with Grace, who is 4.” 10 |

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I just f inished reading Ian Aldrich and Corey Hendrickson’s “One Day in October” [September/October]. Our family climbs Mount Monadnock every year on the Friday after Thanksgiving. The rule used to be you had to be 5 years old to climb, but that was forgotten when younger grandchildren would not be denied the thrill of standing atop the rocky vista. We have climbed in rain, sleet, snow (up to two feet), and an occasional clear and crisp day. In 2016, at age 69, I climbed the mountain five days before a total knee replacement to stand with my oldest granddaughter and my youngest grandson atop Monadnock. We have climbed with as few as five and as many as 18. Thoroughly enjoyed the article, and we are looking forward to November 26! John Allen Scituate, Massachusetts

Looks of Love My husband, Paul, and I giggled when we read your “I see the bridge!” story [“The Bridges of Barnstable County,” July/August]. For many, many years while traveling to Wellf leet, Massachusetts, we played “I see the bridge!” with our four kids. First one to see the bridge got a prize: a kiss from everyone (including the dogs). Now we’re in our 80s and still playing “I see the bridge!”... he always wins! Mary Flanagan Westford, Massachusetts

Unpacking It All I enjoyed “The Storage Shed” and realized that for me, the July/August issue of Yankee itself was a mini version of Mel Allen’s box of mementoes about his father. I read the article on Julia Child and recalled being surprised in my teenage years that my dad would be glued to the TV for every one of her programs on public television, even though he never cooked one

BEOWULF SHEEHAN (HOOD); DIANA LEVINE (KEOHANE); JODY CLINEFF (CLINEFF)

Dear Yankee

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11/19/07

10:05 AM

Page 1

The Promise A Most Unusual Gift of Love

HOLIDAY CROP To guard against the winter drear, We watch as gardens far and near Get planted with electric deer And plastic Santas at the rear. —D.A.W.

the poem reads:

A Most Unusual Gift of Love “Across the years I will walk with you— in deep, green forests; on shores of sand: and when our time on earth is through, POEM READS : in heaven, too,THE you will have my hand,”

thing in our kitchen in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Then, the piece on the Barnstable County bridges took me back 60 years to Dad in our used “Across the years I will walk with you— Dear Reader, Chevy, trying to keep the radiator The drawing you see above is called The Promise. It is completely composed of going just long enough to make it green forests; on ashores ofplaced sand: dots ofin ink.deep, After writing the poem, I worked with quill pen and thousands over the Sagamore Bridge for famof these dots, one at a time, to create this gift in honor of my youngest brother and and when our time on earth is through, ily outings. his wife. My father has passed on now, but Now, I have decided to offer The Promise to those who share and value its in heaven, too, you will have my hand.” my New England roots are watered sentiment. Each litho is numbered and signed by hand and precisely captures the every time I open Yankee. detail of the drawing. As a wedding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a Kathleen Braden Dear Reader, standard for your own home, I believe you will find it most appropriate. Seattle, Washington The drawing you see above called Promise.” It isfully-framed completely composed dots oftone ink. After Measuring 14" byis16", it is“The available either in a subtleofcopper We want to hear from you! Write to us at editor@yankeemagazine.com. ‘Notable’ News I L LUS T R AT I O N BY D. A .W.

BEOWULF SHEEHAN (HOOD); DIANA LEVINE (KEOHANE); JODY CLINEFF (CLINEFF)

ArtRobtSextnPromise0108

Congratulations go out to Sophfronia Scott, whose Yankee essay “Hope on Any Given Day,” about resilience in the face of tragedy, has been named a “Notable” entry in The Best American Essays 2021, published this past fall. You can read her piece at: newengland.com/any-given-day

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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writing the poem, I worked with a quill pen and placed thousands of these dots, one at a time, to with hand-cut double mats of pewter and rust at $145*, or in the mats alone at create this gift in honor of my youngest brother and his wife. $105*. Please add $18.95 for insured shipping. Returns/exchanges within 30 days. Now, I have decided to offer “The Promise” to those who share and value its sentiment. Each My bestand wishes are by with you. litho is numbered signed hand and precisely captures the detail of the drawing. As a wedding, anniversarySextonart or Valentine’s or simply a standard for your own Inc.gift • P.O. Boxas581 • Rutherford, CA home, 94573I believe you will find it most appropriate. (415) 989-1630 Measuring 14" by 16", it is available either fully framed in a subtle copper tone with hand-cut All major credit cards are welcomed. Please call between 10 a.m.-5 p.m. mats of pewter and rust at $110, or in the mats alone at $95. Please add $14.50 for insured shipping Standardguaranteed. Time, 7 days a week. and packaging. Your satisfactionPacific is completely are also accepted. Please include a phone number. My best wishes areChecks with you. *California residents please 8.0% tax The Art of Robert Sexton, 491 Greenwich St. include (at Grant), San Francisco, CA 94133

Please visit our at card number, address and expiraMASTERCARD and VISA orders welcome. Please sendwebsite card name, tion date, or phone (415) 989-1630 between noon-8 P.M. EST. Checks are also accepted. Please allow 3 weeks for delivery.

www.robertsexton.com

“The Promise” is featured with many other recent works in my book, “Journeys of the Human Heart.” It, too, is available from the address above at $12.95 per copy postpaid. Please visit my Web site | at

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Inside Yankee |

MEL ALLEN

Stars of Wonder

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For the past few weeks I have been listening to songs by a Maine chorus of girls and young women, nearly all immigrants who came to these shores after arduous journeys [ “Their Voices Carry Far,” p. 108]. Enter the lives of these singers, see how they have bonded not only with their music but also by reaching out to each other, and like me, you may find it impossible to believe that we cannot emerge from this pandemic with renewed purpose. This issue of Yankee remains filled with the optimism that these holidays will connect us with family, friends, and each other. Threaded throughout the issue is the work of some of our region’s wealth of skilled artisans, who continue to create foods and handcrafts that remind us that talent and inspiration are not easily deterred. I want to imagine our readers settling in, turning these pages, and simply feeling the glow of possibilities that await—especially with “The Holiday Bucket List” [p. 88]. Finally, a closing note about Edie Clark, the writer of Yankee’s much-loved “Mary’s Farm” column. She wants her readers to know that the letters she has received from many of you are her own rays of light. Every day, she tries to write a few more lines of a new story. If you’d like to send Edie a note, write her at Jaffrey Nursing Center, 20 Plantation Drive, Jaffrey, NH 03452. Her work still lives at edieclark.com.

Mel Allen editor@yankeemagazine.com

JARROD MCCABE

year ago I ended this page with a hopeful note: “One day soon, I know I will begin like this: We are back on the trail. Let’s go see everyone we have missed. It doesn’t matter when it is, it will be like our first Christmas.” And last spring, as we proudly showed off our vaccination cards, it felt as though windows had been opened on the first heady warm days of the season. We saw our neighbors’ faces for the first time in more than a year. We reclaimed the simple pleasures of sitting outside at a restaurant. We were there. And then, as we all know now, we were not. It would be easy to feel so forlorn that not even the buoyancy of the holidays could lift us. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, we need to be reminded by stories of hope and resilience and wonder that we did see the sun again, albeit too brief ly, and that it still waits just behind the clouds. When you read Joe Keohane’s ode to Myrtle the Turtle [“Queen of the Deep,” p. 100], think about what she overcame merely to survive to adulthood, let alone to become the New England Aquarium’s leading star. Ian A ld rich ’s stor y about the Giving Fridge in Middlebury, Vermont, [“Goodwill to Go,” p. 16] will introduce you to Bethanie Farrell, who responded to Covid upending her life by creating a way to provide delicious local food to neighbors in need.

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My Secret Santa A stranger’s kindness, and an unforgettable gift.

very Christmas I think of him. A man whose name I never knew who tapped me on the shoulder as I stepped away from the customs checkpoint at Miami International Airport, duffel bag slung over my shoulder, a small black three-ring notebook clutched in my hand. This was a week before Christmas 1969. I was 23, newly married, and my wife had breezed through the gate where our flight north awaited. I was returning from my time as a Peace Corps volunteer on the Colombian coast, whose relentless heat made me dream of winter in Maine, where I was heading— the start of a new life. “Come with me,” the man said. He was African-American, maybe 30 years old, in a crisp customs uniform. His voice was quiet, insistent. “This way.” You want to think you’ll be cool under f ire, unfazed, that when the 14 |

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unexpected happens you’ll meet it with grace and calm. But I could not breathe. I clutched the notebook. Inside was a card illustrated with an ornament-filled tree. “To Mom and Dad” I had written on the sealed envelope, which was not meant for them. Inside was a plastic sandwich bag, into which I had placed a few grams of Colombia’s infamous plant export for Americanos. I held up the notebook and blurted, “Do I bring this too?” He nodded and put my duffel on the floor. He led me to a windowless room lit by overhead fluorescents. I remember the hard chair, a long table. I remember hoping my voice did not tremble. I knew bringing this plant on a plane was a federal crime. I knew the life I was going to in Maine was no longer in my hands. His voice was soft yet firm. Where was I coming from? What was I doing there? Where was I going? I wanted

to tell him the truth. That I had lived with two other volunteers. That every few weeks someone knocked on the door. A paper bag came in, a few dollars went out. That we put on some Dylan and sat on the open balcony by the sea, and that the moonlight on the waves was too beautiful to express. That when I left I pinched a few leaves into the sandwich bag as a keepsake, like bringing home shells from the beach. That I was unimaginably stupid to do this at a time when Miami was at the center of a national drug crackdown. I wanted to say that I had many plans for Christmas, and none of them involved being in this room. He reached for my notebook. He flipped it open and turned pages slowly. He removed the envelope. I knew he would feel a slight bulge in the center. The world as I knew it was about to end. Except. He looked at me, then tucked the envelope back into the notebook. He smiled slightly. I have never forgotten his words: “You’re good to go, my man.” He added, “Be careful out there.” I wonder how many other shoulders he had tapped. I wonder if he simply knew that of all the fish he might reel in, I would be the smallest. I like to think it was Christmas, and he calculated the future of a life he held in his hand. I wonder if he went home later and told his own story of a young man with a stricken face and a card with a tiny lump. And how by not opening an envelope, he gave the gift of a future not derailed by the most foolish, most naïve thing I could possibly do. Which is why I have never forgotten him. After I landed, I f lushed the bag’s contents down a toilet. But I kept the notebook. It lives in a box deep in a storage unit. And inside is a card with a picture of a green tree and ornaments that no one ever saw again.

J O N AT H A N C U M B E R L A N D

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First

LIGHT

Goodwill to Go Started as a holiday boost, a community meals project in Vermont puts down year-round roots. BY IAN ALDRICH | PHOTOS BY COREY HENDRICKSON

ate last year, as the pandemic still gripped the country and winter loomed, Danielle Boyce, the owner of American Flatbread, a pizza restaurant in the college town of Middlebury, Vermont, specializing in local ingredients, received an unexpected email. The sender was Bethanie Farrell, a recent Southern California transplant to Middlebury who wanted to connect residents who couldn’t afford healthy, nutritious food with area eateries that were struggling to stay afloat. She called it the Giving Fridge. What caught Boyce’s attention was a plan both simple and audacious. Farrell had rented a Main Street space to sell plants and local honey. She would use the proceeds to buy meals from local restaurants and distribute the food between Christmas and New Year’s for free to those who needed it. Business owners would get a muchneeded boost in revenue, while struggling residents would have easy access to salads, spring rolls, freshly made breads, and vegetable-laden entrees. “It gave us some money at a time when everything felt so uncertain,” says Boyce, who at one point last year saw her business drop by as much as 55 percent. “We all needed whatever help 16 |

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we could find, and this gave us a little bit of revenue. It was awesome.” But what started as a one-week holiday push to get 250 meals to those in need never stopped. Today, the Giving Fridge has a permanent home in a former downtown diner. Each week, Farrell collaborates with eight area restaurants to assemble and donate nearly 300 prepared dinners and lunches. The recipients are anyone who needs the food—no questions asked. In a state where one in four residents don’t always have enough to eat, the Giving Fridge’s success is as much a tribute to Farrell’s vision as it is a sign of the immediate and deep-seated need she’s trying to address. “I know f inances are a barrier to eating healthy, but it shouldn’t be,” says Farrell. “Because good health requires healthy food. If you’re not healthy, you can’t work. It affects your happiness. It affects whether you have to depend on other people. And that’s not a good place for anyone to be in.” — At the heart of the Giving Fridge is an actual refrigerator. Farrell stumbled across the old appliance last November in the downtown storefront she planned to turn into a painting studio.

It had been a long road back to her creative side. Farrell grew up in Ohio, studied painting in college, and then forged a successful career directing gallery exhibits around the world and heading up her own artist management company. But in 2016, Farrell was crippled with a severe neurodegenerative condition that kept her largely bedridden for the next two years. Her eventual recovery changed not only how she had to live her life but what she wanted from it. Through experimental treatments and a radical change of diet, Farrell regained her health, and as she did, she and her husband, Billy, a photographer and native Vermonter, began talking about leaving their life in Southern California for a new start. Before long, they had bought 10 acres NEWENGLAND.COM

9/9/21 12:05 PM

left and below :

At her storefront in Middlebury, Vermont, Bethanie Farrell sells houseplants to help fund her Giving Fridge meals program. bottom right : The actual fridge where donated meals are kept (a reclaimed Snapple cooler). bottom left : The exterior of Farrell’s building on Main Street, a former diner that was sitting vacant before she moved in.

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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First

LIGHT

| GOODWILL

TO GO

Farrell with the guinea hens at her farm, Nice Island. Many of the eggs that she collects go toward the Giving Fridge.

of forest and meadow that hugged the shores of Lake Champlain, which they called Nice Island. Last year the couple moved to Vermont. The Farrells had planned to build a small farm of their own that could also double as a public space to host workshops on things like pollinators and agroforestry. But the pandemic temporarily shelved construction plans. After Farrell read a recent University of Vermont study that revealed the depths of the state’s food insecurity issues—and with unexpected free time on her hands—she decided to focus on creating something that truly addressed the times. “[Food insecurity] is not an issue that’s easily visible,” she says. “There’s a woman who comes in here—she and her husband own their home, they have a car, you’d never know they were struggling. But when Covid hit, their income just stopped. She told me, ‘We look like we’re doing OK, and we can’t keep it all together.’ They’re not the only ones. And knowing how so many restaurants were struggling, there seemed to be a way to be able to make a difference.” That difference is obvious the moment you set foot inside the Giving Fridge’s headquarters. This is not a soup kitchen or a food pantry. It’s a 18 |

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space that evokes a sense of rebirth and healing. In a building that sat vacant for several years, plants crowd the front of the room. Many are hand-me-downs that Farrell nursed back to health. They’re propped up on old apple crates. In the back, the resurrected refrigerator hums, stocked with food. “The worst part of being so sick was that I couldn’t be of value anymore,” says Farrell. “I had to put so much focus on myself and my health so I wouldn’t be a burden to my husband. It was a kind of torture to not be able to work or help anyone else out, so this has been really great.” At the moment, Farrell has just finished organizing that day’s donations in different plastic crates. The containers are filled with f latbreads, soups, and spring rolls. In the fridge is a stack of stir-fries to give out, as well as potpies. Farrell is confident the sugar cookies will go fast and is cautiously optimistic about the salads with goat cheese. On her desk sits a stack of cards that lists the partner restaurants as well as Farrell’s reminder of what this whole endeavor is all about: “Someone cares about you and wanted you to have these delicious meals,” it reads. Soon, a mother from Vergennes and her young son stroll inside. “I loved that goat cheese salad,” she says

after Farrell explains the offerings. “I liked that other one, but the goat cheese was a surprise. I never would have made it before, but it was great.” Next comes a ponytailed middleaged man in a black NASCAR “Dale Jr.” T-shirt. He’s another regular, and he’s picking up for himself and two friends. “Looks like you got some nice stuff today,” he says, looking over the crates. “I loved that stir-fry, but ooh, that sauce was a little spicy.” His eyes widen. “Hey, are those cookies?” Others file in. Farrell knows them all. The exchanges aren’t long, but there’s a f low to them. The conversations are relaxed and familiar. There’s talk about dogs and Farrell’s guinea hens. For a few minutes, the man with the ponytail explains how he discovered a bird’s nest while he was cutting firewood. Through her own illness, Farrell is well aware of the feeling of shame that can come with asking for help, so she’s worked as much as she can to eliminate it from these interactions. She wants people to feel good about the food they’re picking up and the sense of community around this project. Farrell is also thinking beyond what she’s already created. She plans to host workshops on nutrition and cooking. She’s talked with a local hospital about developing a program around dealing with chronic disease. And as she and her husband develop their farm, Farrell sees the Giving Fridge as a natural extension of the public programming they still want to build there. “I just want to help people’s quality of life,” says Farrell. “I was lucky. We were f inancially OK, but it was still difficult to get the help I needed and the education to help me understand what I was dealing with. How we often help people is so fractured. We need to be thinking more holistically. I want to help people deal with whatever struggles they might be facing so they can understand their wellbeing and take control of their health.” giving fridge.com NEWENGLAND.COM

9/9/21 12:07 PM

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9/7/21 11:58 AM

First

LIGHT

| WEEKENDS

W I T H YA N K E E Q & A

TJ Douglas

ine pro TJ Douglas wants to knock down every barrier that stands between you and a great bottle: the elitism, the uncertainty, the geographical trivia. As co-founder of the Urban Grape, the acclaimed Boston wine shop that he runs with his wife and business partner, Hadley, he created a wine classification system that empowers both oenophiles and oenophobes to find what they like. The Douglases also wrote a highly accessible wine guide, Drink Progressively, that takes the confusion out of pairing food and wine; meanwhile, they’re helping to promote diversity in their industry with the Urban Grape Wine Studies Award for Students of Color, which launched last summer at Boston University. We recently caught up

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with Douglas on the heels of one very busy year. —Amy Traverso Q. Sometimes it seems the wine world is divided between box-wine drinkers and connoisseurs. Where does that leave the rest of us?

Actually, most of us fit into the in-between: the world of $10-to-$30 bottles. And I’d say that 95 percent of people drinking wine might not consider themselves connoisseurs. Most of us just want to drink wine that tastes good to us. Q. But there’s still a kind of imposter syndrome people may feel if they can’t say whether 2016 was a great year in Bordeaux. How do you help newbies out?

That gets to the whole point of why

wine feels elitist—it’s marketed that way. If you’re just trying to find a $20 bottle to pair well with your turkey dish, a wine review might tell you that a 2016 syrah is the best choice. But you might like the 2017 better because it’s more fruit-forward. I taste about 6,000 wines a year. Based on their body or mouthfeel, I put them on a scale of 1 to 10 for whites and 1 to 10 for reds, and they’re organized that way on shelves in the store. You can explore within those categories based on your palate. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to pair wine with food based on its body than its vintage or aroma or geography or varietal. Q. Compared with other parts of the world, New England’s wine

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Catching up with a game-changing Boston wine expert and featured Weekends with Yankee guest.

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9/9/21 1:29 PM

PHILIP KEITH AND OJ SL AUGHTER

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On Nantucket Island Forrest Pirovano’s painting “Brant Point Light” shows a historical lighthouse Brant Point Light Station is located on the north side of Nantucket Island. First erected in 1746, it is America’s 2nd oldest lighthouse. Standing 26 feet high, it is the shortest lighthouse in New England and the most often rebuilt lighthouse on the east coast. The station is still in operation flashing its red light every 4 seconds and can be seen 10 miles out to sea. With the large whaling industry in the 1740s, a light for the harbor was a necessity. For those who arrive in Nantucket by ferry, Brant Point Light welcomes visitors to the island. This beautiful limited-edition print of an original oil painting, is individually numbered and signed by the artist.

This exquisite print is bordered by a museum-quality white-on-white double mat, measuring 11x14 inches. Framed in either a black or white 1½ inch deep wood frame, this limited-edition print measures 12¼x15¼ inches and is priced at only $149. Matted but unframed the price for this print is $109. Prices include shipping and packaging. Forrest Pirovano is a Cape Cod artist. His paintings capture the picturesque landscape and seascapes of the Cape which have a universal appeal. His paintings often include the many antique wooden sailboats and picturesque lighthouses that are home to Cape Cod.

FORREST PIROVANO, artist P.O. Box 1011 • Mashpee, MA 02649 Visit our studio in Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod All major credit cards are welcome. Please send card name, card number, expiration date, code number & billing ZIP code. Checks are also accepted.…Or you can call Forrest at 781-858-3691.…Or you can pay through our website www.forrestcapecodpaintings.com

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9/13/21 9/7/21 11:49 1:57 PM AM

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| WEEKENDS

W I T H YA N K E E Q & A

industry is still relatively young. What’s your impression of our local winemakers?

Wine is still in its infancy here—with people learning about which grapes flourish here in our short season—but there’s so much passion on the part of growers. I’d also add that our local beer and spirits scene is absolutely incredible. We do so well selling these whiskeys, gins, vodkas, and beers at our store. Q. Even though winemaking has a long and rich tradition in places like North Africa and the Middle East, there’s this perception that wine belongs to Europe. On the show, you shared your own experience of being overlooked in the wine world as a person of color. How do you address these issues?

I’m using my platform to amplify the voices of others. That may

mean, for example, promoting an award-winning first-generation Mexican winemaker whose wines are extraordinary and get our customers thinking. But more importantly, we realized a couple of years ago that brown and Black people weren’t applying for our sales jobs—they were only applying for labor jobs. [Looking past] that excuse of “How can I hire people if they aren’t applying?” we realized we had the opportunity to show people that the wine industry can be an amazing career path, even if they didn’t have wine on the table growing up. With the Urban Grape Wine Studies program, we’ve raised enough money so that two students can go through a certificate course each year. We’re also offering paid internships and mentorship. When people come out of this course, they can do whatever they want in the industry.

Q. Do you think the pandemic changed the way we drink?

In the beginning, people were hoarding alcohol like they were hoarding toilet paper. And they were cooking more at home, trying new recipes, learning how to pair wine with food. So it’s been an incredibly busy year for us at the Urban Grape. We did more than 500 virtual tastings in a year. We were able to hire two additional delivery drivers and give everyone a raise. Looking ahead, I can’t wait to have dinner parties again. I think we’re going to appreciate that communal table even more. I hope it feels a little bit like the Roaring Twenties, because that’s my passion. Our visit with TJ Douglas of the Urban Grape is featured on season five of Weekends with Yankee. To find out how to watch, go to weekendswithyankee.com.

ah, the good ol’ days. The people who choose to live at Wake Robin are forever looking forward. Whether it’s making new friends in this Life Plan Community, exploring new activities and hobbies, or learning new skills, the good stuff lies in front of you. If that sounds like you, come see for yourself in Shelburne, Vermont. Wake Robin. It’s where you live.

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9/9/21 1:41 PM

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9/16/21 3:20 PM

LIGHT

| UP

The D Abbey Crèche The Christmas story as a work of art.

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isplayed inside a restored 18thcentury barn on the cloistered grounds of the Abbey of Regina Laudis in—appropriately enough— Bethlehem, Connecticut, is a one-ofa-kind gem of historic craftsmanship. Here, behind a lighted 16-foot display window, stories come to life. “This crèche, I believe, is one of only four in the world of this scope,” explains Sister Angèle Arbib, one of the Benedictine nuns at the abbey. It is also very likely the only one of its

size to be displayed outside a museum. The handcrafted tableau depicting the scene of Jesus’s birth was donated to the abbey in 1949 by the American collector and artist Loretta Hines Howard. Elaborate crèches were a status symbol in 18th-century Europe, and this one is believed to have been created by Neapolitan artisans who gifted it to King Victor Amadeus II in 1720 (when the Treaty of the Hague dictated that he surrender his former kingdom of Sicily and become the king of Savoy). Experts from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art oversaw its thorough restoration in 2001. In the crèche, the Nativity story has been transposed to an Italian mountain village made of cork bark and papier-mâché, with a mural of Mount Vesuvius in the background. The landscape is peopled with 68 figures (and 20 animals) formed from wood, terra cotta, porcelain, and jute fibers. Jesus’s mother, Mary, takes center stage, dressed in pink silk. The three kings are here, replete with turbans and embroidered robes, and three angels hover over the scene. Just as interesting, though, are the f igures on the periphery, representing an array of ethnicities and social statuses. There are peasants and merchants, children and elders. A lamplighter makes his rounds. A woman, perhaps returning from market, leads a donkey. Another walks a dog. There are scenes of frivolity and animated conversation. “Every person that visits can find themself,” says Sister Angèle. “One day, I see myself in this scene, maybe living in this house. The next day, that may have lost its appeal, but another draws me in. It is a moment of universality.” —Joe Bills The crèche is typically free and open to the public to view, but due to Covid restrictions please check the website in advance, at abbeyofreginalaudis.org.

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First

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9/13/21 2:00 PM

Home

H O L I DAY D E C O R

KINDRED

SPIRITS Holiday decorating is all in the family for two Massachusetts sisters who live in houses deeply rooted in place and history.

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BY MEL ALLEN

PHOTOS BY KINDRA CLINEFF

9/15/21 2:34 PM

kindra opposite :

Sisters, neighbors, and historic-home buffs Jody, left, and Kindra Clineff, in Topsfield, Massachusetts. They’re standing outside Kindra’s barn; like her house, it dates to the 1680s and still stands in its original location, a rarity for properties this old. above : Scenes from the sisters’ homes, where the spirit of Christmas past shines in their array of antique ornaments and homespun touches, like a display of clementines.

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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n the small town of Topsfield, Massachusetts, about 23 miles north of Boston, locals gather for weddings and other special events in a restored 300-yearold barn. Visitors tour the 1683 Parson Capen House on a knoll overlooking the 1650 town common, which has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976. Descendants of Topsfield’s earliest settlers still call this place home. When you drive past the stone walls, meadows, and farms by the Ipswich River, it’s clear how tightly the past holds on here. It’s a town that sisters Kindra and Jody Clineff, who grew up in an Illinois home suffused with New England antiques, seemed fated to belong to. Kindra and her husband, Tim, live in the Stanley Lake House on River

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Road. Its first walls went up around 1683, and over the years the house was added on to, each generation leaving its imprint. It is one of the most arresting First Period houses in New England, a two-and-a-half-story wood frame with its original barn, so notable for its architecture that it boasts its own Wikipedia page. On Salem Road, less than two miles away, Kindra’s sister, Jody, lives with her husband, Steven, in the Matthew Peabody House, a saltbox that likely dates between 1672 and 1682. “When an old friend of ours came over for the first time to see our houses, he just looked at us and said, ‘So which one of you is going to move into a cave next?’” Kindra says. “We don’t really know who has the older house. Possibly some sibling rivalry is involved.”

above and right : Jody’s home, the Matthew Peabody House, dressed for the holidays inside and out. Before she and her husband bought it, the First Period structure had been sitting empty for a dozen years, awaiting a new owner.

A photographer whose images have appeared often in Yankee’s pages, Kindra understands that there were forces at work that led her and her sister to this town, these houses. “My formative years were in Illinois,” she says, “but our parents always came east to buy antiques and bring them home. My dad made our farmhouse look like colonial New England. We moved to New Hampshire when I was 12, and Jody 6. My parents bought and restored three old houses.” She adds, “We are not a new-house family.” NEWENGLAND.COM

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9/10/21 10:14 AM

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H O L I DAY D E C O R

Vintage stockings, ornaments, and seasonal memorabilia add to the coziness of the crackling hearth in Jody’s dining room.

Kindra tells about the day in 2003 that changed their lives. She and Tim lived then in the Boston suburb of Winchester and were not looking to move. That day, they simply wanted to drive home via back roads after kayaking on the North Shore. First, they drove past an ancient house on Salem Road in Topsfield. “We said, ‘Oh my God, look at that house,’” Kindra recalls. “It was so wonderfullooking, but you could see it needed a 30 |

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lot of work. Then as we were coming down the hill on River Road, we were like, ‘Oh my God, look at that house.’ There was a ‘For Sale’ sign on it, and the woman who owned it was reluctant to show it to us because she was so tired of people just coming and gawking and not being serious buyers. We sold our house and moved in.” Kindra joined the town historical commission and learned more about the house she had first seen on Salem

Road. It was owned then by MIT but had sat empty for years. When it was finally going up for bid, Kindra convinced Jody and Steven to make an offer. Theirs was the only one, and in 2009 they moved into the Matthew Peabody House, a home f illed with stories. Matthew Peabody was the great-grandfather of Sophia Peabody, who married Nathaniel Hawthorne. But in death he became a local legend: He, his wife, and his granddaughter all died on the same day, October 20, 1777. Jo dy k now s a l l t h is b ec au s e researching the past is her passion. (For instance, from studying records of the time, she knows that while dysentery is listed as the cause of the Peabodys’ death, it’s more probable that they succumbed to smallpox, which was ravaging the town.) Besides working as Kindra’s studio manager and as assistant director of writing programs at the Harvard Extension School, Jody is also completing her master’s in museum studies. She and Kindra can walk friends through their homes as confident in the telling of who once lived there and what their accomplishments had been, and what troubles befell them, as if they were docents. When I ask what is unique about living in a house that has endured through centuries and that will forever bear, like a tattoo, the name of someone who lived long ago, they speak as if with a single voice. “It has real personality,” Kindra says. “It has worn boards that make you wonder, Why is that worn there? Or, What used to be there? You look at the treads on the stairs. You know about the people who walked on them. It’s very captivating to me. People actually chiseled out the beams. There are marks on the joists. You really have a feeling for the people that built it out. To own an antique home is like taking NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 9:52 AM

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H O L I DAY D E C O R

an oath to respect and maintain the property for generations to come.” “I love antiques for their history,” Jody adds. “When I pick up an item I will research and figure out anything I can about it. And it’s the idea that these things have a past and I’m not the only one to have enjoyed it—that really gives me pleasure.” The sisters’ passion for history and tradition and the sense that they belong to the continuum of a home’s life, they are part of its family tree, comes to life in extraordinary ways during Christmas. They start decorating in early November and do not rest until the week before Christmas. While they each confess to wanting the best live tree, Kindra admits that “Jody’s collection of antique ornaments, her feather trees, her everything-vintage Christmas rivals any museum.” In both houses, trees are decorated as if ornaments from another century had rained down. Doors are festooned 32 |

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Kindra’s residence, the Stanley Lake House, was extensively restored in the 1980s. Still, Kindra sometimes wishes she could have seen it before it was spruced up. “I like old plaster and chipped paint,” she admits.

with both fresh and dried fruits and berries. Kindra creates a Maine feeling from moss and plants from her summer place Down East. Jody unpacks her carefully labeled boxes of feather trees and spun-cotton ornaments crafted more than a century ago in Germany.

“I have a spun-cotton Hessian soldier holding a sword at his side. I have a stork with an umbrella. I have a black crow wearing a red tuxedo with gold buttons down the back and a little bow tie,” Jody says, admitting these are but the tip of her personal decorating iceberg. Before Christmas each sister hosts a gathering with as many as 80 guests. One week friends will visit Kindra’s home and enjoy her festive food; the next week they come to Jody’s. “We both do so much work to get ready,” Kindra says. We want others to enjoy all this. Last year was so hard. We decorated with heavy hearts. Now we will ring in a new year. The houses will again come alive.” NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 10:24 AM

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Home

OPEN STUDIO

Felt from the Heart Massachusetts fiber artist Danielle Sadowski crafts a lovable menagerie. BY ANNIE GR AVES

PHOTO CREDITS

PHOTOS BY LINDA C AMPOS

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/15/21 2:47 PM

PHOTO CREDITS

e are joined in the studio by assorted critters: wild, domestic, and anthropomorphic. In fact, the two life-size red squirrels facing off on a birch stump are almost unnervingly real. Whereas the anxious gray mouse, wringing his tiny paws? He’s clearly escaped from a Beatrix Potter tale gone wrong. The moose and the polecat are obvious works in progress, personalities waiting to emerge, but the chickadee is poised to deliver a bright-eyed chirp and take off. Almost all of the creatures crowding this room are the product of nimble felting needles wielded by Danielle Sadowski of Farmhouse Felts, which is housed in the Nova Studios arts collective in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The one unfelted exception—a small, alert Chihuahua named Chewie, on loan from Sadowski’s mom—is firmly his own creation. “I’ve always loved animals,” Sadowski, 35, tells me, as she teases strands of wool from earth-toned clouds of f luff, like plucking cotton candy, and prepares to wrap them around a wire leg belonging to a hound. “I was the kid who always had dogs or hamsters, or if the neighbor didn’t want their cat anymore, I’d be like, Mom?” Five of her seven ferrets are rescue animals, as are two sugar gliders—nocturnal NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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clockwise from top left :

Danielle Sadowski in her North Chelmsford studio with her mom’s Chihuahua, Chewie; wool fiber waiting to be transformed; tools of the felt artist’s trade. opposite : Furred, feathered, and fuzzy creatures all provide inspiration for Sadowski’s work.

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marsupials that resemble flying squirrels—named Chunky and Monkey. “It’s a zoo at home,” she says. “I had a really hard time saying no for a while. But I finally had to put a cap on it, you know?” Instead, she’s creating a felted menagerie. And from the start, seven years ago, when she attempted her first chipmunk, it was “an addiction.” The self-taught fiber artist progressed from a kit that included all materials (“It turned out horribly”) to a fox kit (a little better), and before long she was itching to step away from prepackaged projects and design her own animals. “Mice were my wheelhouse,” says Sadowski, who quickly gained a following with her cavorting Christmas mice in topcoats and crocheted scarves, bearing gifts of tiny pine cones. As her felting techniques improved, she began crafting wilder wildlife, as well as people’s pets, delivering startlingly accurate figures of beloved animals for clients as far-flung as England. It’s all in the needle. From t he moment S adow sk i decides what she’s going to create—be 36 |

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it a gray wolf, a pouncing fox, or a little dog with an overbite—the magic happens where the needle meets the wool. First, she twists and shapes aluminum wire to build the armature that serves as the animal’s skeleton, allowing her to animate the pose. Once she’s captured the proportions, she’ll wrap the wire in a base layer of springy fiber, called core wool. Her particular supply is a blend of common wools such as Corriedale and Dorset, and “it’s magic,” she claims, securing the fiber with a few well-placed jabs of a felting needle lined with tiny barbs. Larger-gauge needles work larger areas of wool as she sculpts the basic shape; these give way to smaller needles as she adds colored wools, gorgeous alpaca or merino, and then begins detailing the face, legs, and torso. Each needle stab leaves its mark, compressing, contouring, sculpting. She molds tiny wet noses out of wax, bakes little clay teeth and toenails, wires miniature fingers. But even so, they’re “pretty much a blank” until she adds the eyes. That’s when they come alive. What starts off innocuously as a pair of white

From playful woodland animals to faithful family pups, no two of Sadowski’s miniature sculptures are alike.

beads begins to respond to layers of color added with alcohol markers, and a 3-D glaze that adds shine and magnifies details. In the final stages, she’ll add wax softened with lanolin and mold it around the eye. “It completes the eyeball,” she says, “and the personality really starts to come out.” So much so that sometimes, she admits, “they’re hard to let go of.” She shows me one last small figure, a work in progress, the beginning stages of another little Chihuahua. Hidden in the wool, waiting to come out, is Georgie, her 13-year-old companion since the early days of first dating her husband. Georgie died the day before we met, and we’ve been talking at length about our pets, voices often quavery, about what they mean to us, how they catch our hearts, like those tiny barbs going into wool. Making a mark. This one she’ll keep; this one is Georgie. farmhousefelts.com NEWENGLAND.COM

9/9/21 4:09 PM

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A Place to Prance Horse lovers, this New Hampshire farm with a Derby backstory could be yours. ittle more than a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean, in North Hampton, New Hampshire, there sits a working horse farm so idyllic that it’s hard to imagine one of the great controversies of modern sports having roots in these rolling meadows and coastal salt marshes. Located less than an hour north of Boston, the 58-acre expanse dubbed Runnymede Farm actually comprises five unique properties, including an 8,500-square-foot mansion, a c. 1900 guest house, and a restored barn. The address, 4 Dancers Image Lane, is a callout to the farm’s most famous former resident: Dancer’s Image, winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby—for a time, anyway. (But more on that later.) top :

An aerial view of Runnymede Farm showing the main residence, an 8,500-square-foot mansion. left : Former Runnymede owners Peter and Joan Fuller with Dancer’s Image at Massachusetts’s Suffolk Downs in 1968.

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W A LT E R J A L B E R T ( A E R I A L) ; C O U R T E S Y O F S U F F O L K D O W N S ( A R C H I V E P H O TO )

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/15/21 2:59 PM

2021-11-

W A LT E R J A L B E R T ( A E R I A L) ; C O U R T E S Y O F S U F F O L K D O W N S ( A R C H I V E P H O TO )

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HOUSE FOR SALE

The soaking tub in the mansion’s master suite, one of six bedrooms in the home; the palatial horse barn, which includes a caretaker’s apartment; the mansion’s family room with its two-story fireplace and windows looking out on meadows, salt marsh, and the ocean.

While the farm’s five parcels are available separately, the hope is that they will be sold as one. “Runnymede Farm is an iconic property, and our aim is to protect it,” says listing agent Tony Jalbert, gesturing toward the swaying grasses of the Little River Salt Marsh. “I guarantee, if you stand here for 20 minutes, you’ll see a buck jump. What other barn has a view like this?” Built in 2001, the shingle-style mansion has six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, f ive f ireplaces, and luxuries galore, from hand-planed walnut floors and custom iron light fixtures, to a wine cellar replete with old-world cabinetry. The third-f loor media room features ocean views, while the European-style 40 |

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kitchen boasts a French La Cornue range; there’s an infrared sauna in the exercise suite. The warmth of the paneling and woodwork throughout contrasts with the polished marble of the kitchen and pantry countertops and the Tunisian stone floor of the master bath. Meanwhile, equine residents can settle into the 4,080-square-foot barn, which has 12 stalls. There’s also a heated tack room, a bathing bay with hot and cold water, a kitchen, an office, and a caretaker’s residence. Nine fenced-in acres include a riding rink and a jumping area, and infrastructure is in place for an indoor riding rink. Runnymede started in 1923 as a dairy farm owned by former Massa-

chusetts governor Alvan Fuller, a summer resident of North Hampton. (The next time you’re stuck in Boston traffic, you can thank Fuller, whose dealership imported the first automobiles to the city in 1899.) When the farm passed to Alvan’s son Peter, however, the Guernseys gave way to thoroughbreds. Peter Fuller was a successful businessman, having taken over his father’s car dealership. An amateur boxer and wrestler in his youth, he also f lirted with sports management, guiding the career of Massachusetts heavyweight Tom McNeeley, who fought for the world championship in 1961. (Today McNeeley is best remembered as the father of “Hurricane” Peter McNeeley, who fought Mike Tyson in one of the most-watched boxing matches of all time, in 1995.) But it was in the world of horse racing that Fuller experienced his highest highs and lowest lows. In 1964, he bred the mare Noor’s Image with the celebrated racehorse Native Dancer. Their colt was first named Alvan T., after Fuller’s father, and then rechristened Dancer’s Image when Fuller, believing the horse’s ankles were weak, opted to sell him. His wife, Joan, however, liked Dancer’s Image and convinced him to buy his own horse back at auction.

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A few years later, in 1968, Dancer’s Image pulled away down the stretch to win the 94th Kentucky Derby by 1½ lengths. But when a post-race test found the anti-inf lammatory drug phenylbutazone in his system, he was disqualified. It marks the only time in the Derby’s nearly 150-year-long history that the official winner was removed. (At the time of this writing, the fate of Medina Spirit, the 2021 Derby winner who subsequently failed a drug test, was still being debated.) Fuller appealed the disqualification of Dancer’s Image, kicking off a lengthy legal battle. Phenylbutazone, or “bute,” was legal in training but not in competition. Fuller acknowledged that Dancer’s Image had received a shot six days before the Derby to alleviate pain in his ankles; however, bute typically clears a horse’s system in 72 hours. No conclusive explanation was ever found for why it was present in Dancer’s Image on race day. For his part, Fuller suspected foul play. Earlier that year, when Dancer’s Image won a race two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Fuller had donated his winnings to King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. Fuller said his support of the Kings may have spurred someone to tamper with either his horse or the test results. Fuller never had another Derby contender but did continue to raise winning horses, most notably Mom’s Command, who was ridden by Fuller’s daughter Abby to the 1985 New York Filly Triple Crown and later enshrined in the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. Today a billboard on the property commemorates the achievements of Dancer’s Image and Mom’s Command. What possibilities might rise next from these fields of dreams? Runnymede Farm in its entirety is being offered for $25 million. For more information, contact Tony Jalbert at Tate & Foss Sotheby’s International Realty at 603-498-6241 or go to tonyjalbert.com. NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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PLIMOTH PATUXET MUSEUMS PLYMOUTH, MA Gratitude and Giving Thanks. We have so much to be thankful for as we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the First Thanksgiving, when the Pokanoket Wampanoag and Plymouth colonists came together after a season of diplomacy to share a harvest feast in the fall of 1621. Join Plimoth Patuxet Museums for a host of special activities exploring how this history — and the deeply human expression of gratitude that inspired it — continues to impact us to this day. Plan your visit today.

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/30/21 12:45 PM

Follow along @YANKEEMAGAZINE #MYNEWENGLAND

CELEBR ATE THE HOLIDAYS IN GILDED AGE FASHION NEWPORT, RI Located atop downtown Newport’s Historic Hill neighborhood, Hotel Viking opened to an awestruck public almost a century ago. As a member of the prestigious Historic Hotels of America, this hotel holds a special place in history while combining style, comfort, and modern amenities. More than a building or a name, Hotel Viking is an iconic and important landmark in the Newport landscape, inspired by and committed to the unique experiences of its guests: past, present, and future.

HERITAGE MUSEUMS & GARDENS: GARDENS AGLOW SELECT DATES NOVEMBER 26–DECEMBER 26, 2021 SANDWICH, MA This treasured holiday tradition features beautiful light displays throughout the gardens, festive seasonal décor, and fun activities. Roast marshmallows at outdoor fire pits, view a stunning model train display, participate in a reindeer scavenger hunt, and more. Stroll the gardens with family and friends, and enjoy Heritage in a whole new light. HeritageMuseums.org

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THE OGUNQUIT PLAYHOUSE PRESENTS: IRVING BERLIN’S WHITE CHRISTMAS 2021 SELECT DATES DECEMBER 1–19, 2021 PORTSMOUTH, NH The Ogunquit Playhouse’s production of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas returns to The Music Hall. Packed full of dazzling dance numbers, iconic songs, and actors straight from Broadway, this “holiday card come to life” is an experience you won’t want to miss. TheMusicHall.org

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9/30/21 12:46 PM

Buon Appetito! photos by brian samuels | styling by catrine kelty

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/21/21 4:13 PM

C E L E B R AT I O N S

| Food

Senior food editor Amy Traverso shares recipes from her family’s “Italian-ish” holiday traditions.

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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C E L E B R AT I O N S

n the panoply of better-known Italian-American holiday traditions—if any of them are truly known beyond the nearly 16 million of us in the United States whose family roots go back to Italy—the Feast of the Seven Fishes looms largest. Based on a Sicilian tradition called la vigilia, this Christmas Eve meal is a multi course pescatory extravaganza of salt cod, clams, lobster branzino, calamari—whatever is considered local and festive, as there’s no official menu and it varies by family. Until I moved to Boston’s North End in my 20s and learned more about southern Italian food, I had never heard of it. I grew up with three Italian grandparents and a Lithuanian grandmother named Mary, and as we understood our lineage, we were Italians with one blond grandma who sometimes cooked with a lot of bacon and cabbage. Our holiday food traditions traced a meandering line from my greatgrandparents’ birthplaces in Piemonte and Emiglia-Romana through mid-century America to the mill town of Windsor Locks, Connecticut. We’d gather around the kitchen table in my mother’s childhood home and eat a meal of manicotti 46 |

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Yankee senior food editor Amy Traverso preps the manicotti for a holiday dinner at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts; lending a hand in the background is her husband, Scott.

with Bolognese sauce, stuffed turkey, coleslaw with dill (the one quasi-Baltic note in the meal), Jell-O mold, sweet potatoes, and Mom’s Charlotte Russe for dessert. My father’s side of the family was all Italian, and the meals looked more recognizably Piemontese, with lots of polenta and agnolotti. But I loved the varied tastes and textures of Grandma Mary’s Christmas Eve. The menu told a story about where we’d been and where we were for the 20-odd years we celebrated this way. So I’ve re-created our meal with some adaptations, streamlining the sauce for the manicotti, giving the Charlotte Russe an Italian twist, and adding roasted Brussels sprouts with dates, walnuts, and lemon. As for the turkey, which Grandma insisted on but Mom thought was overkill, I’ve modified our tradition to include my favorite dry-cured rib roast recipe (newengland.com/rib-roast). NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 12:55 PM

C E L E B R AT I O N S

| Food

ONLINE EXTRA! Get the recipe for Amy’s turkey stand-in on these pages, Dry-Cured Rib Roast: newengland.com/ rib-roast

Mom’s Green Onion Dip

Mom’s Green Onion Dip My mom got the idea for this dip from her friend Mickey Shulof sometime in the ’70s or ’80s, but it seems like it was always there: the opening round for any foodcentered family gathering. The “recipe,” as Mom and Mickey know it, is “take these things and put them together and blend,” but I worked out more specific proportions here. It’s just a delightfully creamy, oniony alternative to sour cream and onion dip, with deep notes from the Worcestershire and brightness from the hot sauce. 2 8-ounce packages cream cheese 6–8 scallions, roots trimmed and roughly chopped 3–5 tablespoons milk 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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¼–1 teaspoon hot sauce Thinly sliced scallions and chili oil, for garnish (optional)

In a food processor, pulse the cream cheese and chopped scallions until blended. Add 3 tablespoons milk, the Worcestershire sauce, and your desired amount of hot sauce. If the dip is too thick, add up to 2 more tablespoons milk. Blend until smooth. Top with sliced scallions and chili oil, if desired. Serve with potato chips. Yields 2½ cups.

Manicotti This was always the centerpiece dish of Christmas Eve. Manicotti is considered the Italian-American version of cannelloni, and it’s often made with

store-bought pasta tubes, but we always used homemade crepes (crespelle in Italian). And while Mom usually topped them with homemade Bolognese sauce, I streamlined the process by coming up with a sausage-based sauce. The crepe recipe is nearly identical to Julia Child’s, because why mess with perfection? You can make the crepes and the sauce a day or two in advance, then finish the dish on the day of your gathering. FOR THE CREPES

1 cup all-purpose flour 2/3 cup cold milk 2/3 cup cold water 3 large eggs ½ teaspoon table salt 3 tablespoons melted salted butter, plus more for brushing pan | 47

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The feast in full swing, starring Manicotti, DryCured Rib Roast, and Brussels Sprouts with Dates, Walnuts, and Lemon.

FOR THE SAUCE

¾ pound sweet Italian sausage, removed from casings 1 medium onion, chopped 2 large garlic cloves, minced 28 ounces crushed tomatoes (canned) ½ cup water 1 teaspoon table salt ½ teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper ¼ teaspoon ground allspice FOR THE MANICOTTI

3 cups whole-milk ricotta cup minced fresh parsley 1/ 3 cup minced fresh basil Zest of ½ lemon ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese 1/ 3 cup Parmesan cheese 1/ 3

First, make the crepes: Combine all ingredients in a blender and mix until 48 |

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smooth. Refrigerate for at least 20 minutes and up to overnight. Heat a medium nonstick skillet over medium heat. Brush with some melted butter. Pour 2 to 3 tablespoons of batter into the center of the pan and tilt in all directions to form a thin pancake about 8 inches wide (you’ll need about 16 crepes total). Cook until golden on the bottom, then flip and cook briefly on the other side. Transfer to a plate. Repeat with remaining batter, stacking the crepes with layers of parchment or wax paper in between. If not using right away, wrap the crepes in plastic wrap and refrigerate. Next, make the sauce: In a large skillet over medium heat, cook the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces with a wooden spoon, until lightly browned, 8 to 10 minutes (cut up any stubborn chunks with

a pair of kitchen scissors). Add the onion and garlic and sauté for 5 more minutes. Add the tomatoes, water, salt, pepper, and allspice; reduce heat to low, and let the sauce simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes. If making in advance, cover and refrigerate up to 3 days. When ready to assemble, make the filling: In a medium bowl, combine the ricotta, parsley, basil, lemon, and nutmeg. Preheat the oven to 375°. Spoon or pipe a line of filling down the left side of each crepe, then roll the crepes around the filling to form tubes. Spoon a bit of sauce into the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking pan. Lay the crepes in an even row over the sauce, then top with the remaining sauce plus the mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses. Bake, uncovered, until the cheese is NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 12:56 PM

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C E L E B R AT I O N S

melted and golden, about 15 minutes. Serve hot. Yields 8 servings.

Brussels Sprouts with Dates, Walnuts, and Lemon

Manicotti

I made up this dish from scratch, but it was partly inspired by a sweet Thanksgiving treat my mom taught me how to make as a kid. We’d take walnut halves and stuff them inside dates, then roll the dates in coconut to serve as after-dinner nibbles. (It was the height of 1980s sophistication, you may recall.) Here, I paired the dates and walnuts with caramelized Brussels sprouts and lemon. It’s a terrific combination. 4 pounds Brussels sprouts, ends trimmed and halved lengthwise 1 cup chopped pitted dates Zest of 2 medium lemons 3 tablespoons olive oil 1½ teaspoons kosher salt ¾ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ½ cup chopped walnuts Juice of 1 medium lemon

Preheat the oven to 400°. Set 2 large (18-by-13-inch) rimmed baking sheets on the racks to preheat along with the oven. In a large bowl, toss the Brussels sprouts with the dates, lemon zest, olive oil, salt, and pepper. When the baking sheets are hot, divide the mixture among them, turning the Brussels sprouts cut-side down (they should sizzle when they hit the metal). Transfer the pans to the oven and roast for 20 minutes. Remove the pans from the oven and scatter the walnut pieces over all. Return the pans to the oven so that the pan that was on the lower rack is now on top (and vice versa). Roast until the Brussels sprouts are nicely browned, about 10 minutes more. Remove from the oven and transfer to a large serving bowl. Drizzle the lemon juice over all and toss to coat. Yields 8 servings. 50 |

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/17/21 11:02 AM

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9/7/21 5:53 PM

Food |

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Tiramisu Charlotte My Uncle Lindo has always loved the creamy Charlotte Russe cake that Mom made every Christmas Eve. This sculptural icebox cake came wrapped in ladyfinger cookies and filled with a fluffy vanilla Bavarian cream. Looking for a little more drama, I cross-pollinated mom’s Charlotte Russe with a classic Italian tiramisu to come up with a layered dessert thickened with mascarpone and scented with espresso and rum. It’s a showstopper but very easy to execute, and it requires no baking. It does, however, require a 9-inch spring form pan. 2 (7-ounce) packages ladyfinger cookies (24–36 ladyfingers, depending on size) ½ cup milk 1 package (2 teaspoons) gelatin 4 large egg yolks

¾ cup granulated sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla paste or vanilla extract ½ teaspoon kosher salt 2 cups whipped cream 2 cups mascarpone cheese 2 cups espresso or very strong coffee ¼ cup rum Cocoa powder, for dusting

Trim half the ladyfingers so that they stand 3¾ inches high (save trimmings). Set aside. Put the milk in a bowl and sprinkle the gelatin over the top to let it soften. Meanwhile, in a double boiler over simmering water, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar, almost constantly, until the mixture is very pale and thickens visibly, 5 to 7 minutes. When you lift the whisk out of the mixture, the drops should linger for a second on the surface.

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Remove the egg mixture from the heat and let cool for 5 minutes. Whisk in the milk and gelatin mixture, the vanilla paste (or extract), and the salt. Set this mixture in the refrigerator to cool for 15 minutes. Using an electric or stand mixer, slowly beat the cream and mascarpone in a large bowl. Start at low speed and gradually increase to high until the mixture holds firm peaks. Very gently fold half the cooled egg mixture into the whipped cream, so you don’t deflate the whip. Repeat with remaining egg mixture. Cover the bowl, and return to the refrigerator to chill for 1 to 2 hours. Now, assemble the cake: Pour the coffee and rum into a shallow bowl or baking dish. Working one at a time, take a smaller ladyfinger piece and dip briefly in the coffee mixture to moisten halfway (this takes only a second). Lay the piece on the bottom of the springform pan to begin forming your first layer. Repeat until the bottom is filled. Now take enough of the 3¾-inch unsoaked ladyfingers to line the sides of the pan, standing them up on their cut ends so the rounder sides face out. Spoon a third of the chilled filling into the pan and use a spoon or offset spatula to gently smooth it out. Top with another layer of soaked ladyfinger pieces (any size). Repeat this process once more, then top with the last of the filling. Lightly cover the cake with plastic wrap (try to prevent it from touching the filling) and return to the refrigerator to chill for 5 to 8 hours. Just before serving, dust the top of the cake with cocoa powder. Run a knife between the cake and the sides of the pan to loosen, if needed, then unlatch the sides and gently lift the cake (still on the bottom plate) from the pan. If you have a piece of red and white bakery string (or a pretty ribbon), tie that around the cake to hold it. Serve cold or at room temperature. Yields 10 servings. NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 12:57 PM

C E L E B R AT I O N S

| Food

Tiramisu Charlotte

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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Celebrating the makers of the best New England artisan foods, from cheeses to chocolates to blueberry muffins, all delivered right to your doorstep. BY A M Y T R AV E R S O , A I M E E T U C K E R , A N D K AT H E R I N E K E E N A N

P H O T OS B Y A DA M D E T O U R | S T Y L IN G B Y C AT RINE K E LT Y

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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9/15/21 3:31 PM

ine years ago, we created the Yankee Food Awards to honor the artisans whose cheeses, chocolates, jams, and charcuterie have made New England such a wonderful place to live and eat. Since then, we have celebrated dozens of delicious treats, and our list of new delights to explore has only grown. This year, we chose a mix of cheeses, sweets, charcuterie, and crackers that together represent the ultimate New England grazing board for holiday entertaining. And to round out the celebrations, we also selected some iconic New England foods that make for great eating and great gifts, from lobster pie to gingermolasses cookies to New Haven–style pizza. Knowing that many of you live beyond our borders, we chose foods made by companies that ship around the country. These “awards of excellence” prove that New England is a food lover’s paradise—and that is reason enough to celebrate this year. Happy holidays!

Ready to serve up on a platter, our “Grazing Board” winners range from Connecticut-made salami to rich, tangy cheeses from Maine and Vermont. For details, see next page.

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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T HE GR AZI NG BOARD

CR ANBER RY- ALMOND CR ISPS Maine Crisps Waterville, ME We adore Karen Getz’s sweet-savory crackers, which happen to be gluten-free but which shine as the perfect base for all kinds of cheeses and spreads. mainecrisp.com

DULCE SAL AMI Oui Charcuterie Woodbridge, CT At Before and After Farms, Matt Browning turns the pigs he raises with his wife, Phoebe, into delicious charcuterie. The standout here is the fennel-laced Dulce dried salami, which is like a concentrated sweet Italian sausage. ouicharcuterie.com

DATE MAMOUL Aissa Sweets Concord, NH Ahmad Aissa began baking in 2012, not long after coming to the U.S. from Syria. His chocolate-walnut baklava and mango mamoul cookies are a delight, but we especially love the date-stuffed mamoul baked in a mold to make each one look like a lovely package. aissasweets.com

COWLES CHEESE Barn First Creamery Westfield, VT This bloomy-rind goat’s milk cheese, made in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom from Merlin Backus and Rebecca Velazquez’s small herd, has a bright tang and a rich, Brie-like creaminess. Facebook; order on saxelbycheese.com

GAR LIC-ROSEM ARY HERBED RICOT TA Crooked Face Creamery Skowhegan, ME Raised on a Maine dairy farm, Amy Rowbottom began making cheese about a decade ago, and she has truly mastered the art of ultracreamy ricotta, which she presses overnight to remove excess liquid, then flavors with aromatics like garlic and rosemary. upnorthricotta.com

QUINCE PASTE Vermont Quince Newfane, VT Quince paste is a traditional Spanish sweet (dulce de membrillo) made with this ancient fruit, a cousin of the apple and pear. Nan Stefanik discovered the confection on a trip to Spain and, learning that quinces grew well in her home state of Vermont, decided to make it herself. Sliced thinly, it does a sweet-tart do-si-do with most cheeses. etsy.com

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 12:16 PM

SOPPR ESSATA PICCANTÉ CHOCOL ATE CHARCUTER IE Tavernier Chocolates | Brattleboro, VT Chocolate charcuterie is a vegetarian ganache roll, dusted in cocoa, that’s made to be sliced and enjoyed on a grazing board. Here, almonds and a hint of Hungarian chili pepper elevate the chocolate into something richer, more complex, and fully delicious. It’s just one of several types of chocolate charcuterie made by John Singer and Dar Tavernier-Singer in their Brattleboro shop, along with a full line of truffles, bars, and bonbons. tavernierchocolates.com

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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T HE ICONS

N EW HAVEN–ST YLE PIZZ A Zuppardi’s Apizza West Haven, CT New Haven–style pizza, or apizza, is beloved for its long-fermented, charred crust and just-right amount of cheese. Zuppardi’s Apizza, founded in 1932 by Dominic Zuppardi, gives the full apizza experience, even after being frozen and shipped (in packs of six). zuppardisapizza.com; order on goldbelly.com

LOBSTER POT PIE Hancock Gourmet Lobster Co. Topsham, ME If lobster rolls are the hit single, lobster pie is the deep cut—but it’s just as yummy. Here, puff pastry blankets ramekins filled with Maine lobster in sherry cream sauce. It’s decadent stuff, and celebrationworthy fare. hancockgourmetlobster.com

GINGER- MOL ASSES COOK IES Flour Bakery Boston, MA Joanne Chang’s mini chain of bakeries is famous for sticky buns, but the chewy, perfectly spiced ginger-molasses cookies deserve their own cult following. This is the kind of treat that leaves you with a vivid taste memory and a craving for more. flourbakery.com

APPLE CRUMB PIE Michele’s Pies Norwalk, CT With a classic crust base and a sweet crumble topping, this apple pie is a delicious cross between a crisp and a pie. Michele Stuart’s pies are so good, they also won a Yankee Food Award last year for blueberry pie—not to mention multiple blue ribbons at the National Pie Championship. michelespies.com; order on goldbelly.com

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NEWENGLAND.COM

9/10/21 11:57 AM

JORDAN MARSH BLUEBER RY MUFFINS Montilio’s Baking Company Brockton, MA Shopping at Jordan Marsh may be only a memory, but the original muffin recipe lives on at Montilio’s, a family-owned bakery outside Boston. Enormous and sweet with a cakelike interior and a crunchy sugared top, each muffin is crammed with so many blueberries that they turn the batter a lovely shade of lavender. montilios.com

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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In Good Company

After 75 years, community tradition shines as bright as ever at The Vermont Country Store

In Weston, Vermont, the holidays will arrive in a year that’s already marked by a very special celebration: the 75th anniversary of The Vermont Country Store, founded in the heart of this town in 1946 by Vrest and Mildred Orton. Here, their grandson Eliot Orton, one of The Vermont Country Store’s family proprietors, shares his thoughts on the importance of community ties, the company’s 75th anniversary, and the magic of Christmas. The Vermont Country Store has always had a close connection with the Weston community. What has that meant to you? After college, I actually lived and worked in New York City, but I never really fit in. I’d walk around and stop at crosswalks and look up at the tall buildings, and my coworkers would say, “What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to march forward.” [Laughs.] I had this desire to be in a small community again. My grandfather had felt the same thing. He had lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a writer at the Pentagon. But he had this dream of living a simpler life and being a part of a community. I discovered that too. He knew, and we know, how important country stores are to a community. They’re

The Vermont Country Store’s family storekeepers (from left): brothers Gardner, Cabot, and Eliot Orton with their father, Lyman Orton, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday. places where the community can come together—that’s what my grandfather wanted to build. What’s your fondest memory of being at the Weston store during the holidays? I remember being about 15 and this group came in and started

1946

The Vermont Country Store opens in Weston, VT, a few months after the first catalog [left] is published and mailed to the Orton family’s friends and acquaintances.

1961

The popular Mountain Weave line of Vermont-made cotton table linens makes its debut.

YK1121_VCSAdvertorial3_REV.indd 62

singing Christmas carols. It was like something from a movie. Customers stopped what they were doing, their eyes were wide, looking around, like, Is this really happening? I also remember just working in the store at that time of year when the snow would begin to

1967

A second store opens in Rockingham, featuring an authentic 19th-century covered bridge, rescued and relocated from a nearby town.

1975

A new generation of leadership begins as Lyman Orton succeeds his father, Vrest Orton, as president of The Vermont Country Store.

fall. All of us who love snow would walk out onto the front steps, and I could imagine this little village looking a lot like the one my grandparents saw when they moved there in the 1930s. There’s a kind of calm and tranquility about it—life is slower. It felt special; it still does.

1978

Phone orders begin for catalog sales. From the start, all call operations have been 100 percent Vermont-based.

1981

The company acquires and begins making Common Crackers, the original “cracker barrel” crackers.

9/17/21 10:54 AM

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and mon al ers.

This Christmas, Make Us Your Holiday Destination! The Vermont Country Store has been making Christmas dreams come true for 75 years—even Santa fills his sleigh here! And for good reason…we’re the real deal. A genuine country store stocked with holiday delights from homemade fudge and Vermont cheddar to twinkling ornaments, fun toys and games, and stocking stuffers galore. Bring the whole family! The Vermont Country Store in Weston, Vermont, as it looked not long after opening in 1946. Founder Vrest Orton is shown at left. The Vermont Country Store is celebrating its 75th anniversary—what does that make you think about? I think we have something like a hundred people who work for us who are related to somebody else who works for us. It’s a family business of families, and multiple generations of families. I was in the Rockingham store in June and there were two new young folks working there, and someone said, “These are Mamie Thayer’s grandkids.” I know Mamie’s mother, Hazel Hale, who lives in Weston and still comes into the store as a sort of an ambassador. I was just blown away. It really impresses upon me that we have to be the best stewards as possible and make really good decisions so we can ensure that The Vermont Country Store lives on for those families and those generations who’ve given so much to it. The Vermont Country Store’s inventory is so eclectic. What do you personally stock up on when you visit the Weston store or the one in Rockingham?

I’m such a boring shopper—it’s the stuff I use day in and day out that I gravitate toward. (Though of course I’ll go and sneak a few pieces of my favorite candy too.) But what’s fun is to take my kids and see them running around and bringing stuff back to me. They’ll come up all excited: Have you seen this? Can you believe I found this!? They act as though I’ve never been in the store before. It’s hilarious! I love to see that excitement and see the store through their eyes. Looking to the future, what are you most excited about? There’s been an awakening in people for appreciating the quality of what they buy, how it’s made, and who makes the materials that go into it. We give those things a lot of thought, and we care about what we sell. I want there to be more stuff in this world that lasts long, because we can’t live in a world that continues to chew up resources on things that don’t last. So I’m hopeful that in our next 75 years we continue to get better at finding things that last a lifetime and give our customers delight during the time they do use it.

Make a day of it – visit both of our stores! W E S TO N

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2000s

The Vermont Country Store leadership transitions to Lyman Orton’s three sons, Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot, who represent the company’s deep family roots as they help guide it into the 21st century and find new ways to connect with customers across the generations.

11/13/20 8:32 AM

2001

The online era begins at The Vermont Country Store with the launching of VermontCountryStore.com. VermontCountryStore.com.

2003

The Vermont Country Store revives a beloved heritage cosmetics brand, Tangee, best known for its colorchanging lipstick.

2006

VOL. 75, No. 26

House-baked Cookie Buttons, a longtime Orton family specialty, make their debut.

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2007

More than half a century after its first issue was published, The Vermont Country Store catalog goes full-color [right: the 2021 holiday catalog].

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RECIPE CL ASSIC

Dry-Cured Roast Turkey First published almost a decade ago, this Yankee recipe has earned its place at the Thanksgiving table.

urkeys are tricky birds. The breast meat is delicate, the legs take longer to cook, and bringing the latter up to temperature often means overcooking the former. Brining (soaking the turkey in a salt-andsugar solution) solves these problems, plumping up and seasoning the breast meat. However, it’s a messy process. Our favorite solution? The dry brine. In this method, you apply the seasonings right onto the skin of the meat. 64 |

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It’s simpler, and the bird comes out just as moist and f lavorful. Just be sure to use a natural turkey, as many frozen ones come prebrined. You can even cure the turkey as it thaws. Happy Thanksgiving! DRY-CURED ROAST TURKEY Note: The amount of salt you use here depends on the size of your turkey. Use 2½ tablespoons if it’s 13 pounds; 3 tablespoons if it’s in the 14-to-15-pound range.

2 ½–3 tablespoons kosher salt or sea salt 2 tablespoons dried rosemary leaves 1½ tablespoons dried thyme 1½ tablespoons dried crumbled sage 1½ teaspoons whole mustard seeds 1½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 1 13-to-15-pound natural (untreated) turkey 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

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2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 1 large firm–tart apple, such as Granny Smith or Northern Spy (unpeeled), cored and cut into large chunks 1 small onion, peeled and cut into chunks 1¼ cups reduced-sodium turkey or chicken broth ¾ cup medium-sweet hard cider Pink Lady apples and lemon leaves, for garnish (optional)

Three days beforehand, put salt, rosemary, thyme, sage, mustard seeds, and pepper in a spice grinder and pulse until they form a fine powder. Rinse turkey and pat dry. Sprinkle all over with two-thirds of the spice mixture, concentrating on thighs and breast. Toss remaining spices into the cavity. Cover with plastic wrap and chill in refrigerator three days. For extra-crisp skin, remove plastic wrap the night before roasting. To roast, preheat oven to 425°. Put a V-shaped roasting rack into a large roasting pan and set aside. Gently separate skin from breast meat on both sides so that you can get your hand all the way in, being careful not to tear the skin. Rub 3 tablespoons butter onto the breast meat on both sides. Brush skin all over with 2 tablespoons melted butter. Put apple and onion pieces in the cavity. Set turkey, breast side down, onto the roasting rack. Pour broth and cider into the bottom of the pan and put in oven. Roast 45 minutes, basting occasionally. Flip the bird over; then roast, basting occasionally, until the thickest part of breast to the bone reaches 160° on an instant-read thermometer, another 1¼ to 1¾ hours, depending on the size of the bird. Tip the turkey to drain juices, and transfer to a cutting board or serving platter. Tent with foil and let sit 30 minutes while you make the gravy. Garnish with apples and lemon leaves, if you like; then carve and serve. Yields 10 to 12 servings. NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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PROVIDENCE, RI

HISTORY, CULTURE, HIP SHOPPING, AND FOOD FOR ALL TASTES ADD UP TO ONE OF THE BEST HOLIDAY GETAWAYS AROUND. BY ANN HOOD • PHOTOS BY ANGEL TUCKER

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opposite , clockwise from top left :

The 1798 Nathaniel Smith House on Benefit Street, dubbed “the most impressive concentration of original Colonial homes in America”; noshing at chef Champe Speidel’s Persimmon; the iconic Haven Brothers diner-on-wheels; shopping at Stock Culinary Goods. this page : Hitting the rink at the BankNewport City Center.

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By the time I was a teenager in the 1970s, though, Providence had lost much of its sheen. The fabled Biltmore Hotel, which had opened in 1922, closed, as did those department stores where I’d gone for school clothes every September and Christmas shopping every December. The once-vibrant city was a desolate urban landscape when I moved away in 1978. What a surprise, then, to find a very different Providence in 1993, the year I moved to an apartment in a beautifully restored colonial on Transit Street on the East Side. That historic neighborhood was almost demolished in the ’70s to make way for a parking garage; thanks to the spunk and determination of architectural historian Antoinette Downing, it was saved and restored.

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Ever since Roger Williams founded Providence in 1636, spunk and determination have created and resurrected this city over and over. The Providence of today is a thriving, historic, creative, hip city—a perfect city, in fact, in which to spend a weekend this holiday season.

FRI DAY

Check in to the boutique “vintage chic” Dean Hotel, in the heart of downtown. It’s filled with custom furniture and eclectic artwork from local artists. Then head to an early dinner at New Rivers, a cozy restaurant just a short walk away on Steeple Street. You can’t turn a corner in Providence without bumping into history, and New Rivers offers a gorgeous view of the First Baptist Church, the old-

est Baptist congregation in the United States, founded in 1638 by Roger Williams for members to meet in private homes. The church you are gazing at held its first meeting in 1775. New Rivers, owned by Beau and Elizabeth Vestal, is known for seasonal food that celebrates and collaborates with local purveyors. The house-made charcuterie is the perfect starter—think smoked duck breast and pork rillettes served with really good mustard and pickled veggies. No matter what else you order, make sure to get the homemade Parker House rolls and the triple-cooked French fries with malt vinegar aioli, a nod to the way Rhode Islanders put malt vinegar—not ketchup—on their fries. After dinner, make your way to Trinity Rep for its production of A Christmas Carol. For the past 44 years, Trinity Rep has reimagined this classic play (even streaming it last year when Covid shut down theaters). The lights will dim, and holiday magic will begin. After the play, if you’ve feeling like grabbing a late-night snack, line up with college students, workers ending their shifts, and hungry locals at Haven Brothers, one of the oldest restaurants on wheels in the country. Originally, Haven Brothers was a horse-drawn lunch wagon started in 1893 by a widow named Anne Haven, who bought it with the insurance money from her husband’s death. Every afternoon at 4:30, it pulls up on Dorrance Street next to City Hall and serves hot dogs, burgers, and fries late into the night. I

PH CO H TR O I S TCIRAEND H I TASR D E R ( D E A N H O T E L ) ; B R O W N U N I V E R S I T Y ( G A T E S )

When I was growing up in West Warwick, Rhode Island, people called Providence “Down City.” But to me, it was the city: home to glamorous department stores—Gladding’s and Shepard’s and Cherry & Webb—and exotic restaurants like Ming Garden (whose chicken wings are still legendary to Rhode Islanders) and the opulent Loews State movie palace, built in 1928.

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this page : The main gate of Brown University’s Van Wickle Gates, where according to campus superstition any Brown student who passes through more than twice is doomed not to graduate. opposite : The Bolt Coffee bar in the Dean Hotel, serving up caffeine fixes from locally roasted beans.

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recommend getting a Haven Dog— mustard, relish, onions, celery salt—at the take-out window, and munching it on the walk back to the hotel.

SAT U RDAY

Start your morning with coffee and a break fast sandw ich from Bolt, right in the Dean. For a break from your caffeine routine, try a café miel (espresso, steamed milk, and honey) or the Woodsman (espresso, steamed milk, maple syrup). Now properly refueled, drive up College Hill to view Brown University’s grand Van Wickle Gates, which lead to the ivied main campus and onto Hope Street, where every December the Hope Street Merchants Association decorates trees and sidewalks with unusual lights created by neighborhood artist Cristin Searles Bilodeau. Be prepared to do some holiday shopping at the independently owned businesses that line Hope Street. Start 76 |

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at Frog & Toad, which “sells stuff you don’t need but gotta have,” like Kamala Harris action f igures and Rhode Island–themed T-shirts, coffee mugs, and ornaments. Big this year is anything emblazoned with “Knock It Off,” then-governor Gina Raimondo’s famous warning to those who kept throwing parties as Covid cases rose. Kreatelier is an interior design shop that also sells unique, all-organic cotton baby and kid clothes, as well as dresses, scarves, and jewelry for grownups. At Stock Culinary Goods, you can get a presentation board shaped like a whale or the state of Rhode Island, as well as other locally made and classic kitchen goodies. After all this shopping you should be ready for lunch, which means it’s time to head to the Wurst Kitchen, part of the restaurant Chez Pascal, which is a lovely place for dinner, with its tin ceiling and seasonally driven menu. But this December afternoon

from left : Loading up on stocking stuffers on Hope Street, where boutiques run the gamut from toys to clothes to home goods; a peek inside the cheeky, Rhode Island– centric gift shop Frog & Toad.

you want house-made wursts, ordered from a take-out window or eaten inside with a nice glass of cabernet. (I always share a wurst or two with my husband but dig into the pork-butt pastrami sandwich myself.) To work off some of those calories, go downtown to the BankNewport City Center outdoor ice skating rink, where for just $7 you can glide across the ice for up to three hours. Finish the afternoon shopping on nearby Westminster Street at the indie bookstore Symposium and—for one-of-a-kind items made in Rhode Island and Massachusetts as well as “selected artistry and weirdness from across the country”—Craftland (imagine if Etsy came to life as a store). NEWENGLAND.COM

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He showed us what he made, told us his prices, and made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. The values are amazing. The gems, the colors, the designs, the quality and Keith’s philosophy, low-profile, close, comfortable, safe and solid make his collection the fastest selling value pieces we’ve ever carried. Everything in the Clipper Ship collection is old Yankee, sharp pencil pricing. This is Keith figuring everything to the closest most conservative dollar and then pricing to exact dollars, like $817, $1,103, $1,672. Yes, this is odd pricing, it reflects though, Keith’s sharp pencil approach. Over 100 pieces online today, ready to ship anywhere USA.

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Pop into The Eddy for a cocktail before dinner at one of Providence’s two James Beard Award–nominated restaurants: Persimmon, owned by chef Champe Speidel and his wife, Lisa, which sources the best local ingredients available; or Oberlin, where chef Ben Sukle serves superlative small plates of seafood and pasta.

SU N DAY

The North, right in the Dean Hotel, c reate s a n e ye-op en i ng, globespanning brunch. Try coconut pancakes, chicken and waff les, or rock crab congee—all perfect sustenance for a visit to the RISD Museum, located on the south side of the Rhode Island School of Design campus. At the 20thlargest art museum in the country, you can lose yourself in Impressionist masterpieces, gaze upon a 10-foot-tall 12th-century wooden Buddha, and peruse more than 700 19th-century 78 |

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Japanese prints. Stop into the museum store to pick up something from RISD’s alumni collection—a tie by Nicole Miller, say, or a Family Guy T-shirt designed by Seth McFarland. From the museum, stroll down historic Benefit Street, a 1.2-mile stretch of 18th- and 19th-century buildings. Look for the majestic John Brown House, former home of the wealthy merchant who founded Brown University in 1764. Next door sits the Nightingale-Brown House, the largest 18th-century wood-frame house in North America. You’ll also pass the Providence Athenaeum, where Edgar Allan Poe wooed Sarah Whitman in the 1840s and H.P. Lovecraft wrote his horror story “The Shunned House,” about the house at 135 Benefit Street. Benefit Street ends at Wickenden Street, where you can grab a cup of sustainable coffee at the Coffee Exchange or a slice of pizza across the

A snowy scene at Prospect Terrace Park, known for its panoramic view of downtown and its imposing 15-foot granite statue of Roger Williams, the city’s founder.

street at Fellini’s. Both still have the laid-back hippie vibe that permeated Providence in the 1970s. On your way out of town, drive south on Route 95 to glimpse the famous Big Blue Bug at exit 19. The 58-foot-long, nine-foot-tall steel and f iberglass termite has reigned over Providence since 1980. During the pandemic, it wore a mask, but now it’s December, so the bug will be sporting a red blinking nose and antlers. It’s a perfect finish to a weekend that covered 400 years of history and all the spunk and determination of the city whose State House is topped by a statue dubbed “The Independent Man,” which you’ll see overlooking and guiding the city as you leave. NEWENGLAND.COM

9/15/21 3:38 PM

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o big-box or online store can spark wonder in a child’s eyes and reawaken an adult’s playful side the way that these independently owned toy stores do. And visiting them this holiday season will help ensure that tomorrow’s kids, too, will know the merry magic of toyland trips. Barnaby’s Toy & Art Shack Nantucket, MA Barnaby Bear’s world expanded last spring when children’s author and illustrator Wendy Rouillard opened this 80 |

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Island Treasure Toys Yarmouth, Freeport, Bath, and Kennebunkport, ME These magical neighborhood toy stores will whisk you right back to your own carefree childhood. Laughter, color, and possibilit y surround you, and if you happen to be in the largest of the stores, in Freeport, where nearly 6,0 0 0 toys await choosy kids, you’ll feel a ripple of excitement every time you hear little feet racing up the stairs. Emily and Paul Drappi’s shops all have an encyclopedic selection of classic, current, and Maine-inspired toys selected with input from their two boys, but each has its own distinct character. Save money in Freeport by adopting from the Island of Treehouse Toys adds a splash of Misf it Toys. In Yarmouth color to Portland’s or Bath, you’ll find Mainehistoric Old Port. artisan-made gifts, too. The newest shop, in Kennebunkport, is actually the oldest, as the Drappis have taken cheery-bright and engaging shop on the helm of Ocean Avenue’s venerable her home island. No longer confined to Toys in the Attic, henceforth known the pages of Rouillard’s popular books, as Island Treasure Toys in the Attic. the character inspired by her grand- islandtreasuretoys.com mother’s handed-down teddy is now guiding kids along their own creative Once Upon a Time Toys paths. In addition to the eye-catching Stowe, VT array of classic and STEM toys, sug- For more than four decades, this ary treats, and Barnaby books, kids toy emporium has been on a quest to giddily gravitate to the mini shacks ensure that there are no adults within that line the walls. Each has a hands- its whimsical walls. No, you’re not on theme—beading, beach crafts, banished if you’re over 18—you’re simwoodwork, slime and other messy ply one of the bigger kids, and you’ll concoctions—and kids can sit down leave with a free balloon if it’s your and immediately dig into one of more birthday week. Alongside beloved-

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the Sears catalog keep company with the playthings you cherished and the hottest releases coveted by today’s techloving, DIY-ing kids. Rockets, crafts, comic book–era pranks, practically every gizmo and game ever invented, and a museum’s worth of vintage and modern model kits fill the immense space (the remote control department alone is larger than many toy stores). And there’s more: The second f loor is a train lover’s dream, where you’ll find gifts for both little engineers and serious collectors. Silk City Model Railroad Club members fire up New England’s largest and most intricately detailed model train display on the first and third Sunday afternoons each month. timemachinehobby.com Treehouse Toys Portsmouth, NH, and Portland, ME Toys peer through storefront windows, dangle from the ceiling, leap

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from the f loor, and parade all around you at these lovingly curated galleries of glee. Pick up a puppet and read a local author’s book in your zaniest voice. Introduce your kids to Polly Pocket, comfort-giving Care Bears, and Cabbage Patch Kids, all suddenly as hot as they were in the ’80s. Then just stand back and watch how sweetly the little ones interact and play in an environment custom-designed for them. Every toy here is selected to engage hands and minds, to be gentle on the environment (packaging included), and to be best in class, whether it’s a simple pop f idget toy or a science project. Owner Kathleen Tutone has spent 28 years observing how “toy people” become creative problem solvers with the ability to mindfully choose joy. Her wish for all kids is the elation of waking up to new toys... more than once every year. treehousetoys.us

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Handcrafted Holidays A festive sampler of craft fairs and artisan galleries for one-of-a-kind gifts. estow ing a present made locally, and especially anything made by hand, is like giving two gifts in one. It expresses both love for the giftee and support for the artists, crafters, and small businesses that help make New England so vibrant. Here, we’ve rounded up some favorite ideas for finding a gift as unique as the person it’s meant for. NOTE: Since some businesses and event

organizers may adjust their operations in light of Covid concerns, please contact them or check online for updated information before making travel plans. ♦ = Shop or institution ★ = Event

♦ 100 MAIN, Falls Village. If you love famed

interior designer Bunny Williams’s aesthetic, you’ll fall hard for her luxurylevel artisan gallery and its perfectly displayed furnishings, wall art, giftware, and fashions. She’s transformed a grocery store in this Hallmark-movie village into a decor destination that will inspire your own holiday wish list. 100mainst.com ♦ CONNECTICUT RIVER ARTISANS, Essex. Connecticut’s oldest continuously operating artist cooperative is an exclusive showcase for Nutmeg Staters, many of whom employ area resources—woods, beeswax, oyster shells—to create gifts with a true sense of place. ctriverartisans.org ♦ FARMINGTON VALLEY ARTS CENTER,

Avon. A 19th-century explosives factory is now home to 20 dynamite local artists and artisans, whose studios are open by appointment or chance, as well as during open studio events. The on-site Fisher Gift Gallery keeps regular hours and reps diverse regional creators, with a focus on finely made pieces at giftable price points. artsfvac.org ♦ GALLERY 53, Meriden. Teddy Roosevelt was president and “Silver City” Meriden was a hub of industrial design when this enduring arts organization originated. Park free across the street, and step into the Romanesque-Revival building that houses 86 |

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its ever-evolving gallery and gift shop, filled with thoughtfully curated handworks from across the region. gallery53.org ♦ GUILFORD ART CENTER, Guilford. A premier spot for American-made artisan wares year-round, the shop at this multifaceted center doubles in size for the holidays. Art glass and jewelry sparkle; hand-stuffed plush animals practically beg to be tucked into stockings. Works by some 200 juried makers ensure you’ll score treasures for everyone—naughty or nice. guilfordartcenter.org ★ NEW ENGLAND CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL,

Mohegan Sun, Uncasville. Bring your biggest shopping bag. As you wander this wonderland of 300 mini shops touting handmade gifts and gourmet foods, you’ll pick up a bounty of presents to gift-wrap, plus everything you need to deck your own halls. 11/5–11/7. nechristmasfestival.com ♦ WESLEYAN POTTERS, Middletown. Just as a zoo stirs wonderment at the sheer variety of creation, the Gallery Shop at this seven-decade-old artists’ guild surprises with its wildly eclectic mix of ceramics, jewelry, handwoven gifts, and more. You’ll see fresh works by some of Connecticut’s most accomplished artisans, plus regional, national, and international talents. wesleyanpotters.com

MAINE ♦ ARCHIPELAGO, Rockland. Whether

crafting felted sand dollar ornaments or carving intricate oyster platters, Maine’s artisans are a creative lot. This shop, associated with the nonprofit Island Institute, gathers the work of 300-plus artists and makers from the state’s islands and coastal communities. thearchipelago.net

★ DESIGNING WOMEN CRAFT SHOWS,

Freeport and Portland. A nonprofit bridging art and community, Designing Women celebrates New England’s women artists while also working with organizations that benefit local women and girls. Its holiday shows offer both heirloom crafts as well as smaller, more affordable gifts and decor across a range of materials: glass, metal, fiber, pottery, and more. 11/20, Freeport; 12/11, Portland. designingwomen.org ★ HOLIDAY POTTERY SHOP, Gardiner. Hosted again this year by the artisanleaning gift shop Monkitree, the annual Holiday Pottery Shop is a magnet for fans of the Kennebec County–based Central Maine Clay Artists and their work. Browse elegant platters perfect for company and sturdy, pretty mugs meant for everyday, and maybe meet one of the local folks who bring them to life. Runs throughout

C O U R T E S Y O F M A I N E C R A F T S A S S O C I AT I O N

CONNECTICUT

On the hunt for treasures at Maine Craft Portland.

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C O U R T E S Y O F M A I N E C R A F T S A S S O C I AT I O N

Trip Advisors Travelers’ Choice Award 2021 Top 10% of hospitality businesses in the world

the holiday season; start date TBA. centralmaineclayartists.org ♦ ISLAND ARTISANS, Bar Harbor and Northeast Harbor. Embossed paper art, handspun and hand-dyed yarn, one-of-akind clocks, wearable fiber art, regionally inspired glass work, artisan-crafted kids’ clothes—and that’s just what Island Artisans’ owners make. They also provide a showcase for more than 100 other Maine artists and makers at their two galleries. islandartisans.com ♦ LISA-MARIE’S MADE IN MAINE,

Bath and Portland. Launched in Bath in 2003, Lisa-Marie’s now occupies four storefronts in its hometown and also has a second location in Portland—plenty of room for its inventory of souvenirs, foods, and crafts made exclusively in Maine and representing 400-plus artisans and small businesses. lisamariesmadeinmaine.com

★ MAINE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

HOLIDAY SALE, online. Browse for unique

and unexpected arts and crafts at this cultfavorite shopping experience, which—as it was last year—has been reimagined as a virtual event in 2021. Hosted annually by the state’s oldest arts school since at least the 1980s, it features juried work by students, alumni, faculty, and staff. 11/19–12/10. meca.edu/holiday-sale

Holiday Packages

~ An Historic 1851 B&B with all the modern amenities ~

Thanksgiving dinner feast! Christmas dinner feast! New Year’s Eve includes wine tasting, food & Murder Mystery Book Direct @ 802-875-4288 • 321 Main St. • Chester, VT • innvictoria.com

♦ MAINE CRAFTS ASSOCIATION GALLERIES, Portland and West Gardiner. Dedicated to advocacy and professional development for the state’s craft artists, the Maine Crafts Association puts Pine Tree State talents in the spotlight at two robust retail galleries—Maine Craft Portland, and the Center for Maine Craft—as well as in its online store, Shop Maine Craft, which lets you search not only for specific media but also for work by BIPOC makers. mainecrafts.org ♦ MAINE POTTERS MARKET, Portland. From the whimsical painted stoneware of Robbi Portela to the mesmerizing organic shapes of Barbara Walch’s pinch pots, the 14 Maine pottery pros at this co-op have an array of creative options for wrapping up your holiday shopping list. mainepottersmarket.com

★ UNITED MAINE CRAFTSMEN SHOWS,

Augusta, Brewer, and Portland. For crafts fans, a UMC show is a don’tmiss proposition. The state’s largest nonprofit craft organization has been putting on shows for 50 years, and today it boasts a deep selection of high-quality handcrafted gifts and stocking stuffers from juried Maine artisans. Augusta Arts & Crafts Show, 11/13–11/14; Thanksgiving Arts & Crafts Show (Brewer), 11/26–11/27; Holiday Arts & Crafts Show (Portland), 12/4–12/5. unitedmainecraftsmen.com

an Outdoor Sound & Light Experience November 4 - December 31 | Tickets at E dith W harton.org

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THE

Holi BUCKET

From Main Street celebrations to sparkling light shows and festive eats, New England has a multitude of merry ways to ring in the season. Time to get Nutcracking! ILLUSTRATIONS BY JULIA EMILIANI

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liday

T L I ST

Driving into a wonderland of light at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay. PHOTO BY TORY PA X SON

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READY,

SET,

Glow

Brighten up a winter’s night at a seasonal light show.

1 WINTER LIGHTS AT SHELBURNE MUSEUM: A highlight of one of New England’s newest holiday displays: seeing the historic steamboat Ticonderoga fully aglow, along with the buildings and campus of this family-favorite museum. Shelburne, VT; shelburnemuseum.org

2 LIGHTS OF CHRISTMAS AT THE JOSEPH SMITH BIRTHPLACE MEMORIAL: Live music, a Nativity scene with real animals, and lights galore make this display at the former home of Mormonism’s founder one of Vermont’s premier holiday illuminations. Royalton, VT; Facebook

GIFT OF LIGHTS AT THE NH MOTOR SPEEDWAY: Only at this time of year does it pay to go slow while driving this 2½-mile race course— otherwise you miss the magic of some 500 eye-popping light displays. Loudon, NH; giftoflightsnhms.com 3

4 NUBBLE LIGHT: While not a light show per se, the annual illumination of this lighthouse just off the Maine coast is one of the region’s most magical sights. York, ME; nubblelight.org

5 NORTHERN LIGHTS: Outdoor outfitter L.L. Bean gets into the spirit with a musical light show, a Twinkle Light Tunnel, and whimsical window displays. Freeport, ME; llbean.com 6 GARDENS AGLOW AT COASTAL MAINE BOTANICAL GARDENS: Sparkly gardens and illuminated walks in the woods beckon at Maine’s biggest yuletide light display. Boothbay, ME; mainegardens.org 7 BRIGHT NIGHTS AT FOREST PARK: The largest holiday light show in New England offers three full miles of wonder as you drive through brilliantly lit displays such as “Seuss Land” and “Jurassic World.” Springfield, MA; brightnights.org

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WINTER REIMAGINED AT TOWER HILL BOTANIC GARDEN: Grounds, gardens, and galleries twinkling with lights turn these 171 acres into a winter wonderland. Boylston, MA; towerhillbg.org 8

9 ZOOLIGHTS AT STONE ZOO: Stroll through large-scale light displays amid the local residents, including bald eagles, reindeer, porcupines, and arctic foxes. Stoneham, MA; zoonewengland.org

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MAKING A LIST OF FAVORITE THINGS to do and see in New England at this time of year is a tall order. Countless seasonal events have delighted New Englanders from one generation to the next, from the illumination of Maine’s Nubble Light, begun more than three decades ago, to the 55-year run of Boston Ballet’s The Nutcracker. And as Christmas 2021 approaches, we can’t know whether all the events in these pages will go forward as planned (websites are included throughout for the most up-to-date news). But we still celebrate them here with appreciation for how they’ve brightened our lives in the past, and with faith that they will continue to shine in the years to come.

6 5

3 4

—THE EDITORS

9 10 LA SALETTE SHRINE: What began as a modest Nativity scene nearly 70 years ago has grown into a spectacular display of more than 300,000 lights. Attleboro, MA; lasaletteattleboroshrine.org

EDAVILLE CHRISTMAS FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS: Travel by foot, train, or vintage amusement park ride through the millions of lights and creative displays on offer here. Carver, MA; edaville.com FANTASY OF LIGHTS: Lighthouse Point Park glows with 100,000-plus lights, 60 animated displays, and the warmth of knowing that proceeds benefit Easter Seals. New Haven, CT; Facebook

10 11 17

HOLIDAY LIGHTS AT LAKE COMPOUNCE: A summertime theme park transforms into holiday heaven with a few hundred thousand twinkling bulbs, festive light shows, and one giant Christmas tree. Bristol, CT; lakecompounce.com 13

14 HOLIDAY LIGHT FANTASIA: Over the course of two miles, Goodwin Park’s light show brings whimsical holiday scenes, familiar characters, and local tributes to life. Hartford, CT; holidaylightfantasia.org

15 WINTERFEST AND THE TUNNEL OF LIGHTS: Climb aboard for a trolley ride through the lights while caroling with the friendly motormen at the Connecticut Trolley Museum. East Windsor, CT; ct-trolley.org 16 RHODE ISLAND HOLIDAY LIGHT SHOW: This one-mile drivethrough experience lets you crank up the radio and sing along to the synced light show. Richmond, RI; rhodeislandlightshow.com 17 HOLIDAY LIGHTS SPECTACULAR AT ROGER WILLIAMS PARK ZOO: Dinosaurs, reindeer, and smiling snowmen—oh my! These are just a few of the luminous wonders sure to get you into the spirit this season. Providence, RI; rwpzoo.org

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Hunting

Things to add to your list while checking it twice.

Head to Maine’s Sunday River to see a cadre of Kris Kringles hit the slopes for Santa Sunday, which benefits a local youth-focused nonprofit. riverfundmaine.org

Say hi to real-life reindeer at the Santa’s Village amusement park in Jefferson, NH, where Rudolph’s pals make their home year-round. santasvillage.com

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Test your knowledge of New England’s famously decked-out mansion museums. kindnesses and charities into life” and whose family would put together yuletide gift baskets for the less fortunate. Meanwhile, the speaking tubes in the nursery were “connected” to the North Pole so the children could tell Santa what they wanted.

➋ This c. 1907 coastal estate puts on quite a seasonal show inside, including a two-story Christmas tree in the front hall and decorations throughout many of its 45 authentically furnished rooms. But where it really shines is outdoors, where the masterfully landscaped grounds transform into a magical display of lights and handcrafted ornaments.

➍ Last year it took 780 volunteer hours to deck the halls at this 138,000-squarefoot oceanfront estate, an Italian Renaissance–style palazzo built for a shipping and railroad tycoon in 1895 (hence, tiny trains can be seen among the home’s 12 themed Christmas trees). Outside the home— which, like its similarly lavish c. 1901 neighbor, will be open for holiday tours—visitors will find a landscape awash in countless colored lights, including 28 twinkling spruce trees.

➌ Despite its imposing High Gothic grandeur, this manse was brightened by the holiday spirit of its celebrated original owner, who once wrote that “that old hallowed Christmas legend … warms the torpid

➎ Part of a one-of-a-kind collection of preserved residences, this Georgianstyle home boasts a long and colorful history that includes a reputed visit by George Washington, the survival of three major city fires,

and a stint as an orphan’s home. When the holidays roll around, it’s decorated in late-18th-century style with wreaths and floral arrangements including both native and exotic flowers and foliage. ➏ Though the famed American political family who built this Georgian Revival beauty used it mainly as their summer home (and twice hosted President Taft there), two coal-burning furnaces in the basement ensured that any holiday stays would be cozy. On hand to provide seasonal tunes: the family’s 1908 electric pneumatic Aeolian pipe organ and original Steinway piano, which are still used to greet visitors at Christmastime. ➐ A turn-of-the-century masterpiece of classic Italian and French influences, this palatial home was recently named one of the nation’s top 10 holiday house tours. Notably, its owner was a famed American author who, no fan of sentimentality, once wrote

a Christmas memoir about wartime refugees in Paris. ➑ Inspired by Queen Victoria’s favorite residence, Osbourne House, this coastal mansion began its holiday event 40 years ago as a weekend tea attended by 67 people. These days, it’s known for hosting a six-week event that draws up to 10,000 people to ooh and aah at rooms filled with lavish 1860s furnishings by Gustave Herter and Victorian-era Christmas decorations by local designers. ➒ The family who built this c. 1928 Stuart-style seaside mansion were such avid sailors that they had five wind indicators installed throughout the home—they could tell if it was a good sailing day even before getting out of bed! Now overseen by The Trustees, the home is decorated for holiday tours (don’t miss the antique sled on the first floor) and holds a festive Roaring ’20s cocktail party with some 200 guests in vintage attire.

ANSWER KEY: 1-C: Eustis Estate, Milton, MA; historicnewengland.org. 2-E: Blithewold, Bristol, RI; blithewold.org. 3-D: The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT; marktwainhouse.org. 4-H: The Breakers, Newport, RI; newportmansions.org. 5-F: The Chase House, Strawbery Banke, Portsmouth, NH; strawberybanke.org. 6-G: Hildene, Manchester, VT; hildene.org. 7-B: The Mount, Lenox, MA; edithwharton.org. 8-A: Victoria Mansion, Portland, ME; victoriamansion.org. 9-I: Castle Hill on the Crane Estate, Ipswich, MA; the trustees.org

DA N K EN N EDY/ H A R M O N ’S F LO R A L CO M PA N Y (A); M A R K F L E M I N G (C ); C A R L T R E M B L AY (F ); ©DA N M AC A L P I N E – US A TO DAY N E T W O R K (I) . A L L OT H ER S CO U R T E S Y O F S O U RC E

➊ Outfitted with 14 fireplaces, ornate carving throughout (in seven kinds of wood), and a hidden staircase to the original owner’s third-floor laboratory, this Gilded Age gem maintained by Historic New England draws holiday inspiration from its Aesthetic Movement interiors, which include textiles by William Morris.

Treat yourself to a Thanksgiving feast with a generous helping of both Pilgrim and indigenous history at Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Plymouth, MA. plimoth.org

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Channel your inner elf and learn to make a balsam wreath with help from the pros at UMaine Extension; just go to the website and search for “wreath.” extension.umaine.edu

Put a New England–inspired toy in a stocking or under the tree. Among the kiddie classics that got their start in our region (some of which are still made here): Wiffle Balls, Erector Sets, and Silly Putty (CT); Bananagrams and My Little Pony (RI); and board games Candy Land, Monopoly, and Life (MA).

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➊ NANTUCKET, MA:

The tang of salty ocean air meets the sweetness of balsam on the cobblestone streets of this island community during Nantucket Noel, a monthlong holiday celebration crowned by the Christmas Stroll: a weekend of marquee events ranging from the Festival of Trees at the Whaling Museum to Santa’s arrival by Coast Guard cutter. nantucketchamber.org PHOTO BY C A R L T R E M B L AY

Feel the warmth of a grateful people at the Boston Christmas Tree, a traditional gift from Nova Scotia in memory of Bostonians’ aid after the 1917 Halifax explosion. boston.gov

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Get twice the twinkle at Portland, ME’s Christmas Boat Parade of Lights, as a fleet of illuminated vessels cast their glittering reflections on the harbor. Now marking its 20th year, the parade can be seen from the shore or on the water, via a Casco Bay Lines cruise. cascobaylines.com

Soak up the Currier & Ives vibe on a horse-drawn sleigh ride, like the ones led by the placid Belgian and Percheron draft horses at Gentle Giants Sleigh Rides in Stowe, VT. Facebook

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CROWD

Pleasers

Get into the community spirit at a downtown celebration.

➋ WOODSTOCK, VT: This favorite fall-foliage town transforms into a Christmascard scene on the second weekend of December, when Wassail Weekend gets under way. Expect the downtown to be filled with the sights and sounds of the season, from twinkling light displays to the jingling bells of horses pulling wagons or—if nature has provided enough of the white stuff—sleighs. woodstockvt.com ➌ KENNEBUNKPORT, ME: With

extra glow provided by its 40th anniversary, Christmas Prelude brightens the first two weeks of December with outdoor markets, parades, the Holiday Trail of Lights, and the illumination of a massive Christmas tree in Dock Square. Look for Santa to show up—via lobster boat! christmasprelude.com

➍ PORTSMOUTH, NH:

Candlelight strolls at Strawbery Banke, a gingerbread house contest, family ice skating, shopping, live shows, and seeing the historic downtown dressed to the nines are among the many ways to get your jollies at Portsmouth’s monthlong Vintage Christmas. vintagechristmasnh.org

➎ STOCKBRIDGE, MA: The

centerpiece of the long-running Stockbridge Main Street at Christmas, held the first weekend in December, is like no other in New England: Dozens of antique cars park along the main drag to help re-create Norman Rockwell’s famous 1967 painting, Home for Christmas. Other diversions include holiday home tours, Victorian carolers, and a visit from Santa. stockbridgechamber.org

➏ NEWPORT, RI: All December

long, expect the holiday spirit to be turned up to 11 in this storied seaport—amid seasonal shopping, dining, and strolling—as Christmas in Newport comes back after a muted 50th anniversary in 2020. christmasinnewport.org

Grab a selfie with the underwater Shark-Diving Santa—complete with red hat, white beard, and twinkle in his eye—at Norwalk, CT’s Maritime Aquarium. maritimeaquarium.org

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Behold the Yankee ingenuity of lobster trap trees, which rise up and down the New England coast in places including Gloucester, MA; Rockland, ME; and Seabrook, NH.

Go full steam into the holidays on a train ride to the North Pole. Among the jolly journeys on offer is The Polar Express Train Ride, based on the best-seller by Rhode Island’s own Chris Van Allsburg and featuring locations in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. raileventsinc.com

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Season’s

EATINGS Savor the holidays with signature foods from both near and far.

GIN GE RB RE A D H OUSE S

The gingerbread house tradition began in 19th-century Germany, after which immigrants brought the lebkuchenhaus to America. Take in the wonder of modern-day cookie constructions at the Gingerbread House Festival at Wood Memorial Library in South Windsor, Connecticut (11/26–12/19), where gingerbread houses range from professional-grade village-scapes to little graham cracker cottages stuck together with oozy icing by festive 5-year-olds. woodmemoriallibrary.org

C A N DY C A N E S FE A S T O F T H E SE V E N FI SH E S

For many Italian-Americans, it wouldn’t be Christmas Eve without an epic seafood feast of salt cod, shrimp, squid, clams, mussels, and other oceanic delicacies. In Italy, it’s common for Catholics to eschew meat the night before Christmas, but the tradition of serving seven seafood species is considered an Italian-American creation (the number seven signifying the number of Catholic sacraments, the days of creation, and the seven virtues and deadly sins). Many Italian restaurants serve these feasts around Christmas, and this year Mare Oyster Bar in Boston’s North End will offer fish such as branzino, salmon, oysters, and calamari over six prix fixe courses on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. mareoysterbar.com

Call “Timberrrr!” on a Tannenbaum by cutting your own Christmas tree this year. A favorite spot is The Rocks, a historic 1,400-acre estate in the heart of the White Mountains, where proceeds from its tree farm help support forest conservation in the Granite State. forestsociety.org/the-rocks

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Drugstore candy canes are fine, but hand-pulled confections from such makers as New Hampshire’s Nelson’s Candy and Music and Vermont’s Laughing Moon Chocolates elevate this everyday sweet into a giftable creation. The hard candy mixture is folded, pulled, layered, and twisted, resulting in translucent layers of red and white that gleam like stained glass windows and taste as fresh as a December morning. nelsonscandymusic.com; laughingmoonchocolates.com

EG GN O G

The seasonal arrival of eggnog in stores puts Bing Crosby on a happy loop in our heads. You can go commercial (Hood makes several tasty variations, including pumpkin spice); small-batch (we’re partial to Connecticut’s Arethusa Farm); or even homemade (recipe at newengland.com/eggnog). Just be sure to drink up! hood.com; arethusafarm.com

Take a walk among luminarias, those homey but magical paper lanterns that brighten the winter scene during such events as the Holiday Stroll & Luminaria in Westerly, RI, and Pawcatuck, CT.

Make a joyful noise at a community carol sing, like the one that Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport has hosted for more than 70 years running. mysticseaport.org

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C H RI S T M A S C O O K IE S

L AT K E S

In 1969, Mary Bevilacqua and Laurel Gabel of Wellesley, Massachusetts, gathered a small group of friends in a living room to exchange cookies potluck-style. Today, three generations of Mary’s family share duties in hosting the famous Wellesley Cookie Exchange, which has spawned several Yankee articles and a cookbook. In turn, countless others have adopted the tradition for themselves. Look for some of Yankee’s ’s favorite Christmas cookie recipes (including some original Wellesley favorites) at newengland.com/holiday-cookies.

Eating foods fried in oil—specifically the thin, crispy pancakes known as latkes—has long been central to the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. But it wasn’t until potatoes made their way from South America to Europe a few hundred years ago that the form met its apotheosis. We

PA S T E L E S

Many Latin American and Caribbean cultures serve variations on Christmas pasteles, which are similar to tamales, but filled with different ingredients and wrapped in banana leaves rather than corn husks. And since about five percent of New Englanders have Puerto Rican ancestry, the region is rich in restaurants that make this delicious and time-intensive holiday staple. At Mana Escondido Café in Boston’s South End, owner Angel Carrasquillo makes pasteles from late October into early January. Fillings range from pork and chicken to vegetarian options. “People just love them,” he says. “If I didn’t have them, they’d be upset.” manabostoncafe.com

love the latkes served at Mamaleh’s Deli in Cambridge and Brookline, Massachusetts (mamalehs.com), and at Rose Foods in Portland, Maine (rosefoods.me). Or to make your own, go to newengland.com/latkes.

C H RI S T M A S P U D D IN G

Even if British-style puddings aren’t in your repertoire, you may remember the scene in A Christmas Carol when Mrs. Cratchit enters “f lushed, but smiling proudly,” bearing a plum pudding “like a speckled cannonball” blazing with ignited brandy and crowned with Christmas holly. It takes a lot of work to get this holiday delicacy right—luckily, The English Cousins of Middletown, Rhode Island, will do all the requisite soaking and steaming for you. Based on a 1910 family recipe, their puddings are loaded with fruit, molasses, and butter; soaked in rum; and coated in icing. Better yet: They deliver. englishchristmascake.com

Load up on seasonal swag at a local Christmas shop, such as Westbrook, CT’s The Pink Sleigh, founded in 1963 and stuffed with giftables from around the world. pinksleigh.com

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Earn your spot on Santa’s nice list (and burn holiday calories to boot) by doing a local charity run or walk, be it a Turkey Trot, Jingle Bell Run, or, yes, even a Santa Speedo Run.

Settle in with some cocoa and cue up a New England-y holiday movie. Tried and true: Christmas in Connecticut, White Christmas, Holiday Inn, The Family Stone. New and recommended: 2019’s Little Women, shot entirely in New England and filled with love, hope, and kindness—namely, what this time of year is all about.

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THEATER CLASSIC COMEBACK: Running from November into the new year, Trinity Rep’s 44th annual production of A Christmas Carol provides a holiday boost all season long. And with this return to in-person shows, director Joe Wilson Jr. is out to deliver “lots and lots of music, singing, and joy.” 11/4–1/2. Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, RI; trinityrep.com GREAT GIFT: It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play is a theatrical twist on the film classic, performed in the style of a 1940s radio broadcast complete with sound effects. These 27 shows celebrate the Bedford Falls–like outpouring of 98 |

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support Hartford Stage received after its own moment on the brink during the pandemic. 11/26–12/26. Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT; hartfordstage.org MERRY AND BRIGHT: Maine’s Broadway-caliber Ogunquit Playhouse and New Hampshire’s oldest theater combine forces to bring Irving Berlin’s White Christmas to the stage and into the hearts of everyone dreaming of a cozy New England holiday. 12/1–12/19. The Music Hall, Portsmouth, NH; themusichall.org ON THE NOSE: The glow of nostalgia lights up the national touring show Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer: The Musical, based on the iconic 1964 stopmotion TV special. Get your fill of kitschy fun! 12/6. The Hanover Theatre, Worcester, MA;

thehanovertheatre.org. For details on other New England shows, go to rudolphthemusical.com. SEE-WORTHY: Horse bells jingle, bonfires sizzle, and costumed performers entertain strollers-by during Lantern Light Village evenings at Mystic Seaport. It’s drama with a seafaring twist, thanks to the softly lit backdrop of shimmering water and ships. Dates to be announced in late November. Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CT; mysticseaport.org

DANCE BEDAZZLED BALLET: Boston Ballet’s The Nutcracker, aka New England’s biggest wow-factor

ABOVE : Irving Berlin’s White Christmas by the Ogunquit Playhouse at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, NH.

take on this holiday classic, takes audiences on a captivating journey filled with athletic feats and special effects. The wildly bedecked Christmas tree, which grows to more than 40 feet before wondering eyes, is outsparkled only by the smiles of the dancers, performing for live audiences for the first time in 22 months. 11/26–12/26. Citizens Bank Opera House, Boston; bostonballet.org CRACKING ON: Maine State Ballet’s The Nutcracker mixes Balanchine’s beloved choreography with homegrown

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M ARK TUREK ( T RINIT Y REP); PE T ER PAR ADISE PHOTOGR APHY (CIT Y BALLE T OF BOS TON)

TICKET

Get a front-row seat to the joyful return of live performances.

D E B R A M I L L E T/ A L A M Y S TO C K P H O TO ( M O V I E S T I L L) ; J U L I A R U S S E L L ( T H E M U S I C H A L L)

Just the

other New England shows, go to bostonbrass.com.

touches: e.g., artistic director Linda MacArthur Miele was mowing her lawn when inspiration struck for reindeer-suited youngsters to whisk Clara’s sleigh offstage. 11/26–11/28, 12/4–12/5. Merrill Auditorium, Portland, ME; mainestateballet.org

M ARK TUREK ( T RINIT Y REP); PE T ER PAR ADISE PHOTOGR APHY (CIT Y BALLE T OF BOS TON)

D E B R A M I L L E T/ A L A M Y S TO C K P H O TO ( M O V I E S T I L L) ; J U L I A R U S S E L L ( T H E M U S I C H A L L)

LEFT : A Christmas Carol at Trinity Rep in Providence, RI. BELOW : Anthony Williams’s Urban Nutcracker in Boston.

HEAD-TO-TOE MAKEOVER: Looking at its old Nutcracker costume, Festival Ballet Providence decided: Off with his head! Visual artists from Big Nazo Lab, the city’s creators of extraordinary creatures, were called on to craft a replacement, which together with a new venue and all-new sets help make The Nutcracker familiar yet delightfully fresh. 12/17–12/19, 12/22–12/24. The VETS, Providence, RI; festivalballetprovidence.org ONLY IN VERMONT: Can you picture Tchaikovsky in flannel? Then you’ll love the bluegrass rearrangements of Tchaikovsky’s party dances, the appearance of the Maple Sugar Fairy, and the twirling apples and autumn leaves that make Moving Light Dance’s Green Mountain Nutcracker a delectably local confection. 12/18–12/19. Barre Opera House, Barre, VT; barreoperahouse.org CITY BEATS: Urban Nutcracker, Anthony Williams’s everevolving revamp of the classic ballet, boldly sashays off in diverse dance directions: hiphop and street tap, flamenco and swing. And no tutu troupe gets audiences grooving like City Ballet of Boston’s colorfully costumed, multicultural cast. 12/18–12/26. Shubert Theatre, Boston; urbannutcracker.com

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SUGARPLUM SPLENDOR: After last year’s leap to film with Through Her Eyes: A Newport Nutcracker Reimagined, Island Moving Company returns its Newport Nutcracker to the lavishly decorated rooms and halls of Rosecliff Mansion. 11/24–12/3. Newport, RI; islandmovingco.org

GO NUTS: Love rocking around the Christmas tree? Check out the Squirrel Nut Zippers as they bring their “Holiday Caravan” show to Midcoast Maine, mixing jazz chords, folk music, and punk rock as they belt out holiday favorites alongside their own hits. 12/9. The Strand Theatre, Rockland, ME. For details on other New England shows, go to snzippers.com.

MUSIC SWAN SONG: The 168th consecutive holiday season since the Handel and Haydn Society’s U.S. premiere of Handel’s Messiah also marks the last for outgoing artistic director Harry Christophers. Expect extra emotion to color a three-hour immersion into the legendary composer’s 18th-century sound world. 11/26–11/28. Symphony Hall, Boston; handelandhaydn.org

NEW-AGE NOEL: This year marks the reunion of the No. 1 Christmas music artist in history with its fans, live and in person, as Mannheim Steamroller builds on a 35-year tradition of touring. Even if you think you don’t

know their songs, you’ve heard them before—and we bet you’ll find yourself humming along. 12/14. The Flynn, Burlington, VT; flynnvt.org. For details on other New England shows, go to mannheimsteamroller.com. GLORIOUS HARMONIES: With rich resonance and nextgen harmonies that lift listeners onto a heavenly sound cloud, Voce—New England’s Chamber Choir—celebrates the return of live choral music with A Very Voce Christmas! featuring seasonal works by some of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary composers. 12/18 at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, Simsbury, CT; 12/19 at Immanuel Congregational Church, Hartford, CT; voceinc.org LIFT EVERY VOICE: A tradition since 1909, Candlelight Carols looked different last year, when 80 recorded-at-home voices offered comfort to those who viewed the broadcast from home or from outside Trinity Church’s wide-open doors. Even as the service of scripture and song moves back inside the glowing sanctuary, it will reflect a shift that has expanded church choirs’ repertoires to include more music by BIPOC composers. 12/18–12/19. Trinity Church, Boston, MA; trinitychurchboston.org

HOLIDAY WIZARDRY: Under the direction of maestro Keith Lockhart, the Boston Pops and its choral collaborators offer up heartwarming, funnybone-tickling tonics for the spirit during the annual Holiday Pops. And when it’s time for the traditional sing-along, it’s magic to hear untrained, unrehearsed voices in an anthem of human connectedness. 12/2–12/24. Symphony Hall, Boston; bostonpops.org HORNING IN: For more than three decades, the members of Boston Brass have been bringing the fun to often-formal musical genres. Expect their top-notch showmanship to lend extra sparkle to yuletide standards. 12/3. Chubb Theatre, Concord, NH; ccanh.com. For details on | 99

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Weighing a quarter ton and coming up on her estimated centennial in the next 10 years, Myrtle may share the New England Aquarium’s Giant Ocean Tank with 1,000 other creatures but is truly in a class of her own.

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Queen of the Deep Generations of New Englanders know Myrtle the Turtle as an aquarium celebrity. For some, she’s also a timeless comfort in a fast-changing world. By Joe Keohane

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No one really knows where Myrtle the Turtle came from.

They know that she came to Boston from a now-defunct aquarium in Provincetown in 1969, and again in 1970, in what was intended to be a temporary exchange. But then 102 |

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the Provincetown facility shut down, and Myrtle became a permanent resident of what was then still a brand-new New England Aquarium. The face of the institution and star of the tank for more than 50 years, she has been visited by millions of people, a few of whom even swam with her. These include Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, country star Rex Trailer, three famous clowns (Bozo, Willie Whistle, and Ronald McDonald), and a mime named Trent Arterberry. When Myrtle arrived here, she weighed 225 pounds. Weight isn’t the best way to gauge a turtle’s age—the size of reptiles can vary wildly depending on where and how they live—but records at the donor aquarium were scant, so it was all that aquarium scientists could go on. At the time, they estimated she was between 20 and 40 years old, which means today she is between 70 and 90 years old, making her the oldest known green sea turtle in captivity. “More realistically, we think she’s in her 90s—somewhere around that range,” says Mike O’Neill, the supervisor of the Giant Ocean Tank. “Hopefully she’ll live decades more.” O’Neill grew up coming to the aquarium. A native of Hingham, on the South Shore of Massachusetts, he has fond memories of looking at Myrtle from the top of the tank as a kid. Now, in his capacity overseeing the delicate reef ecosystem of the tank, he’s the person most intimately acquainted with her. “She’s a stellar community member in the Giant Ocean Tank,” he says. That said, she’s also the largest animal in the tank. And as such, she’s unafraid to assert herself, O’Neill says. If another creature is in her space or in a preferred sleeping spot, she’s not above throwing her weight around. Likewise for newcomers: When the aquarium staff introduce new animals to the tank, they’ll first put them in enclosures and drop them into the tank to acclimate them to their new home. If one of these enclosures ends up in a place that displeases Myrtle, she’ll move it. Otherwise, though, “we don’t really have to worry about any negative behaviors, or aggression, or anything like that,” O’Neill says. “She’s just a big gentle giant, basically.” Certainly, she has little reason for existential concern. The Giant Ocean Tank is a low-stress environment for a green turtle. This sets Myrtle apart from her peers in

P R E V I O U S SP R E A D : B R I A N S K E R R Y. T H I S PA G E : C O U R T E S Y O F N E W E N G L A N D A Q UA R I U M

t’s nasty out on Central Wharf: rain, sleet, snow, high winds. It’s one of those April days when Boston makes a last-ditch attempt to finally and irreparably break the spirit of its inhabitants, which it generally does after coaxing them into relaxing their guard with a string of impossibly beautiful spring days. I walk into the New England Aquarium an hour before it opens. It’s quiet. I walk through lobby doors I have been walking through since I was a kid, and I walk by penguins I have been walking by since I was a kid, too. Though probably not the same penguins. When the facility opens to the public at 10 a.m., at limited capacity due to Covid-19, it will still be pretty quiet. During the worst of the pandemic, the aquarium was closed. The penguins got used to it. In fact, when the staff was preparing to reopen, they had to reacquaint the penguins with human sounds. They did this by piping in crowd noise at a low volume, and then raising it in increments until the birds were again ready to receive the general population. The penguins weren’t the only animals that had to adapt, though. At the start of the pandemic, staffers who work with the harbor seals had to acclimate them to the sudden appearance of masks. They did this by taking their masks off and putting them on during feedings, forging in the seals’ minds a connection between the masked person and the caretaker they knew and trusted. But I’m not here for the penguins or the seals. Led by an aquarium staffer, I walk around the Giant Ocean Tank, on our way to the top. It’s 23 feet tall and 40 feet wide, containing about a thousand Caribbean reef animals and 200,000 gallons of warm water. It glows blue in the darkness of the aquarium, and it still feels vaguely scary, and thrilling, and precarious to be around, as it did when I was a kid. We climb the last set of stairs leading to the top of the tank, step out, and there she is, as she’s always been, ancient and ageless, the 500-pound dinosaur queen of her domain: Myrtle.

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Volunteer Alan Marshall offers Myrtle a mouthful of lettuce at one of her feeding times, which are spread out across the day to mimic the grazing patterns of green sea turtles in the wild.

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tion of Nature, “As recently as the 18th and 19th centuries marine turtles were very abundant, with some populations numbering well into the millions. But in the last several hundred years, we have overwhelmed the species’ ability to maintain their numbers.” All this makes Myrtle more significant, and more valuable to researchers, but it also doesn’t touch her personally. “She doesn’t have to worry about any of those things here,” says O’Neill. Green turtles are great wanderers and brilliant navigators, with females returning faithfully to the same nesting grounds in which they were born to lay eggs every few years. They can migrate thousands of miles between foraging—which they do in the coastal waters of some 140 countries—and nesting, which they do on beaches in 80 countries. Some may traverse an entire ocean basin in their lifetimes. Myrtle does not have that kind of latitude, obviously, but she

W E B B C H A P P E L L / N E W E N G L A N D AQ UA R I U M ( TA N K ) ; C O U R T E S Y O F N E W E N G L A N D AQ UA R I U M (A D)

the open ocean. “If you’re an adult sea turtle in the wild,” O’Neill says, “your concerns, in terms of ending your life prematurely, are going to be predation from large sharks and other big intimidating creatures, boat strikes, fishing gear entanglement, and things like that.” Though green sea turtles, aka Chelonia mydas, still appear around the world, they are an endangered species, due to the aforementioned factors, as well as a few more, including oceanfront development, climate change, and illegal trade (not for nothing have they been nicknamed “the soup turtle”). The beaches where sea turtles lay their eggs—more than 100 at a time, generally—are eroding and getting warmer. The waters in which they swim can be polluted, and the sea grasses and reefs they rely on for food are being degraded. The situation is not improving, either: According to a 2013 report by the International Union for Conserva-

from top : Myrtle’s star power on display in a 1970s telephone ad; a view of Myrtle’s habitat, the fourstory Giant Ocean Tank, whose residents include sharks, eels, rays, fish, and loggerhead sea turtles.

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W E B B C H A P P E L L / N E W E N G L A N D AQ UA R I U M ( TA N K ) ; C O U R T E S Y O F N E W E N G L A N D AQ UA R I U M (A D)

Myrtle bobs and wheels and eats a couple of feet from me. And as I watch her, I’m strangely moved. can move pretty freely in the tank, O’Neill says. Greens are the second largest of the seven species of sea turtle, behind the leatherback, but despite their bulk, they are agile swimmers. They can maneuver almost like drones, thanks to their four flippers. Green turtles are solitary by nature, but exploring the heavily populated reef, and watching and occasionally descending upon the divers charged with its maintenance, helps keep Myrtle stimulated, and by extension keeps visitors to the aquarium stimulated. “I don’t know of many sea turtles that have had the legacy that Myrtle has had,” O’Neill says. “In the 50 years she’s been here, when you do the back-of-the-envelope calculations, that’s like 60 million people who have seen her. The whole point of having the aquarium is to promote ocean creatures and ocean life, and get people to care about the ocean. And that Myrtle has been able to have that big an impact, as just one turtle, is pretty awesome.” And she will, he believes, continue. “In general, she’s doing great,” says O’Neill. “I’m hoping to have a full career here and retire, and still Myrtle will be in the giant fish tank. That’s my goal.” O’Neill is 31 years old. Myrtle’s morning begins when day breaks over the tank.

She generally sleeps through the night, usually at the top of the reef near the surface, her rhythms regulated by artificial lighting designed to replicate the changing light of the passing day. At 8 a.m., relative darkness yields to blue LED light, which simulates dawn. This stirs her. Then the blue light yields to white light, which wakes her up completely. By 9 a.m. she’s swimming, her serrated beak fixed in an expression of grim disapproval, her vast bulk hovering around the feeding platform. There, at 10 a.m., she will be fed by a volunteer named Alan Marshall. Alan is a retirement plan administrator at a local advertising f irm. He’s also a certif ied diver and a longtime member of the aquarium. About three years ago, when his company cut his hours, he volunteered here. He loves it, he says. He is a classic old-school Boston guy, equal parts gregarious, boyish, wised-up, witty, and sarcastic. He doesn’t really drop his r’s—few do at this point—but everything he says comes out with a little top spin on it, in a way that marks him as a local. He works here one day a week, helping to feed Myrtle and donning the dive suit to clean the tank. “We vacuum, and scrub, and do the windows,” he says. “My wife wishes I’d like to vacuum and dust at home as much as NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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I do here. I think she’s buying me a whole setup for home, so I can put all the equipment on and then vacuum. But I said, ‘It doesn’t really ring the same.’” At 10 a.m., when the aquarium officially opens, Alan walks out of a staff area behind the top of the tank with a plastic bin containing a few pounds of greens and seafood. “Today,” he announces, “we got some capelin—or as we like to say in the kitchen, capelini—some squid tacos, which is basically squid stuffed with capelin and some vitamins. And then some lettuce, and Brussels sprouts, and cabbage. Brussels sprouts are usually big, she’s a big fan, but lately she’s been shunning those Brussels sprouts. So we look silly when we say that it’s her favorite.” Alan opens the gate at the edge of the tank and steps out onto the feeding platform, and Myrtle surfaces obligingly. The aquarium sources most of her food from a local restaurant supply company, and Myrtle’s caretakers try to switch it up. Green turtles are omnivores and foragers. They like variety. “We tried green peppers,” Alan says. “Not a big fan. We tried kale. Not a big fan. I mean, who is? We tried some other green things. We tried beets—not that those are green, but somebody thought that would be fun to see how she reacted to the beets. Maybe get her poop to turn red. I don’t know. She didn’t eat the beets. Nobody ate the beets.” Feeding time in the Giant Ocean Tank is carefully coordinated. Green turtles are typically very curious creatures. If there is any other human activity in the tank—if divers are down cleaning the substrate, say, or feeding the other inhabitants—Myrtle will go check it out, an experience one staffer likens to having a spaceship come down on your head. Oftentimes, though, she just wants her shell scratched. The top layer of her shell, where the big scales or “scoots” are, is akin to human fingernails. There is sensation there, and, as she readily reminds people, it frequently requires attention. I lean over to take a photo of Myrtle. “Don’t drop that,” Alan says. “Though you look like you know not to drop that.” “Do a lot of people drop phones in the tank?” I ask. “There have been a lot of things dropped in the tank,” Alan says. “I would say phones are probably the least dropped. Glasses are a good one here. Somehow hotel room keys—I don’t know how your room key comes out, but maybe it’s attached to the phone. Hair pins. Lens covers for good cameras. We try to get them right away.” | 105

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What is it about this animal? I mention to Mike O’Neill how

poignant it is to come here as a 43-year-old man and visit an animal I have seen since I was a kid, and find her looking pretty much the same as she did 35 years ago. “There’s something special about turtles,” he says. “Humans really like turtles. And Myrtle is one of the best examples of a charismatic creature that is extremely memorable. Folks may not keep in mind all the species of fish, or what’s in one exhibit versus another, but almost everybody who has come here has that imprint from Myrtle.” “But why do you think it is? ” I ask. “What does she evoke, exactly?” “Oh man,” he says, sitting back. “I mean, then I feel like we have to get into human behavior and cognition. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that they have the longevity that they have, or they have the size that they have. But yeah, for some reason, turtles have been a fixture for humanity for a long time.” Among indigenous societies going back thousands of years, some saw a special kinship between turtles and humans. Native cultures ranging from Asia to the Americas believed that the world is carried on the back of a turtle. That earthquakes happened when the turtle moved. That the world may someday return to the sea. Native Americans were among them; some called North America “Turtle Island.” It wasn’t until European explorers arrived, though, that demand for the animals exploded. It has been said that green turtles made the peopling of the so-called New World possible. Which means, ironically, that our society was built on a turtle’s back, in a sense. Because green turtles had the misfortune of being the most delicious of the sea turtles, favored both for their meat and their calipee—the cartilaginous material on the inside of the shell— they quickly became a sought-after foodstuff for European explorers, traders, and pirates in the 17th century. Finding them was a godsend. They provided an abundance of good protein, and, stored on their backs in ships’ holds, they could go weeks or months without food or water, providing a welcome break from the seaman’s usual grim diet of hardtack and salt beef. Turtle meat, oil, and sometimes eggs were also seized upon as antidotes to both scurvy and erectile dysfunction, treatments for syphilis and general listlessness, and, in one instance, a means of caulking a hole in a stranded ship. Not for nothing did Christopher Columbus call turtles “the most valuable reptile in the world.” 106 |

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By the 19th century, green turtle meat had broken free of the lowly ship’s hold and risen to become a symbol of Victorian affluence among Americans and the English. It spread to the white aristocracy in the West Indies. It was believed to line the stomach, increasing the body’s capacity to ingest even more rich food. According to one account from the period, turtle soup “has become a favorite food of those who are desirous of eating a great deal without surfeiting … by the importation of it alive among us, gluttony is freed from one of its greatest restraints.” Europeans took an animal that was sacred to the people they were conquering, and turned it into a means of helping themselves achieve ever higher levels of self-gratification (there’s a metaphor for you). The demand for green turtle meat nearly wiped out the species. The population never recovered. Yet sea turtles were a fixture long before humanity came onto the scene, in fact. As far as we know, they have been around for more than 100 million years. They are basically dinosaurs, only unlike dinosaurs they made it to the 21st century. In 1979, the naturalist Jack Rudloe remarked upon this: “It’s hard to say what the turtle’s key to success is. Even though his movements are generally slow, his hearing is poor, and he has little in the way of brains, the turtle can be called one of the most successful animal stories in the world.” So to see Myrtle up close is not only to connect with the history of Western civilization; it’s also to connect to the deep history of the planet, to a world that existed long before the genus Homo blundered into existence a few million years ago. To look at Myrtle is to look at time itself. There’s a stillness, a quiet awe that comes over you when you see a representative of a species that has lasted 50 times longer than your own. In his journal in 1856, Henry David Thoreau, that august New Englander, wrote about this, too: The young turtle spends its infancy within its shell. It gets experience and learns the way of the world through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men and fail. French empires rise or fall, but the turtle is developed only so fast. What’s a summer? Time for a turtle’s egg to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. They have no worries, have no cares, yet has not the great world existed for them as much as for you? Portraying turtles as being blithely unworried by the world may be a case of Thoreau being Thoreau, though. Certainly an animal that lays as many eggs as a green turtle can’t fairly be called oblivious to the hazards of life in the world. Of all the eggs that green turtles lay, very few actually make it, with the vast majority falling prey to ghost crabs, bluefish, gulls, and the like. And yet they endured. Over millions of years, the species ran the numbers, adapted, and survived. Seeing the result of that—one of the very few NEWENGLAND.COM

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KEITH ELLENBOGEN

At various points in the feeding, Alan offers me his assessment of his position at the aquarium. “It’s awesome,” he says. “It’s so awesome,” he says later. “It’s super awesome,” he concludes. All the while, Myrtle bobs and wheels and eats a few feet from me. And as I watch her, I’m strangely moved.

Myrtle hovers near the top of the Giant Ocean Tank, whose artificial coral reef offers a number of prime spots for her second-favorite activity, after eating: taking a snooze.

There is something reassuring about watching a creature that has been unchanged and untouched during a period of such relentless turbulence. that hatched out of an egg buried on a beach, boiled out of that sand with 100 would-be siblings, scrambled to the sea, entered the sea, and survived in the sea for 20 to 40 years, defying crushing odds set by man and nature alike—is like meeting a survivor of the Somme. Seeing such a creature gliding unhurriedly through a warm tank, inches from you, knowing what you know and what she’s done, is awesome.

KEITH ELLENBOGEN

Is that why Myrtle makes us feel the way we do? Awe, as

psychologists are only beginning to discover, confers some unusual benefits. Studies have shown that awe makes us feel more humble, more connected to others, and more generous. It expands our perception of time, and improves our mood and well-being. How does it do this? Paradoxically by making us feel insignificant. Researchers have found that when people experience awe, they experience something called “the small self.” Experiencing awe makes us feel small NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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relative to our surroundings. In doing so, it makes our personal concerns feel smaller, and that makes us feel better. When people talk about awe, they usually talk about things like mountains, or transcendent religious or spiritual experiences. But could it apply to a turtle? I asked UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, one of the first in his field to study awe, what he thought. “Awe arises with encounters of vastness we don’t understand,” he replied. “Giant sea turtles are amazing—and I f ind them aweinspiring—because they are vast in many ways: their size, their age, and how they move extraordinarily slowly.” He concluded: “A great source of awe.” I put the same question to Summer Allen, a neuroscientist and turtle enthusiast who has also studied awe. “I wonder if the fact that Myrtle is both so big and so old might play (Continued on p. 132) | 107

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THEIR VOICES CARRY F By bringing together young immigrants in song, this Portland, Maine, chorus offers a life-changing experience for performers and audience alike. BY M E L A L L E N | P H OTO S BY S É A N A LO N Z O H A R R I S

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“Even though we are only a tiny chorus, we try to give people hope of peace.” —Natalia, age 13, from Angola on Fullam awakens in the darkness of 4 a.m. on Thursday, August 5, at his home in Windham, Maine. He is 73, and “it takes me a while now to get everything together,” he says. Later this afternoon, Pihcintu, the chorus of immigrant girls and young women he founded and directs, will sing live for only the second time since the pandemic made rehearsing, let alone performing, all but impossible. But first, he must get them to Portland.

The size of the chorus over the years has ranged from 20-something to as many as 44, with its members beginning as young as 8 and some remaining for a decade or more. Now there are 28 singers, and he hopes many of them will make it today. But he never knows for certain. It is summer, midweek; the older ones have jobs, and not all with managers who will let them go. No matter that only a few weeks earlier Yo-Yo Ma had joined Pihcintu onstage in Bar Harbor for a Juneteenth celebration, or that the chorus had sung at the United Nations and the Kennedy Center and the National Cathedral, NEWENGLAND.COM

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Y FAR

or that they had been featured on the Today show and Voice of America, or that they had performed at Governor Janet Mills’s inauguration. Or that today Univision will be filming them for a segment with Jorge Ramos, known as the Walter Cronkite of Latin America. “I know no matter how chaotic it may seem at times, we will get it done,” Fullam says. “Four of our best singers can’t be here. You play the hand you’re dealt.” First, Fullam drives 30 miles north to Lewiston to pick up Kaylee*, age 12, born in Texas

to a Congolese mother. She wrote the melody for today’s lead song and will also perform its haunting solo. “She came to us when she was 8, and she could not be still for 30 seconds,” he says. “But singing was everything to her. She learned to concentrate while singing. Now she can be in a studio for hours until she gets the vocal exactly right.” Kaylee climbs into the car at 7, still half asleep. From there, Fullam drives to Gray to pick up sisters Tania and Chrisianne from Rwanda, then to Westbrook to collect Janelle from Burkina-Faso and Yoselin from Honduras. He drives them all to Portland, where he picks up a van loaned by the Portland Housing Authority. Then he gathers up Brenda and Ceira from Sudan before finally reaching the Ocean Gateway, a glass-enclosed conference and event center overlooking Casco Bay, shortly before 10. The seven girls walk in with Fullam, just behind the members of the Portland Symphony who will accompany them. Waiting inside is the acclaimed Kinan Azmeh Ensemble from New York, whose leader and namesake was himself once a Syrian refugee. On this day the chorus’s performance will be live-streamed to the most unusual audience they have ever had: Little Amal, a nearly 12-foot-tall puppet portraying a 9-year-old Syrian girl who is walking alone from Turkey across Europe in search of her mother. But to call this creation merely a puppet is misleading. Little Amal is on a mission to represent the hundreds of thousands of migrant children who live in desperation around the world, not knowing what awaits them each day. They are children without a childhood. To those who encounter Little Ama l along her journey, she is a work of profound imagination, a dramatic depiction of a longing to find not only a mother, but also a place to belong. For the young singers of Pihcintu, there is no need to imagine this longing. More than 300 immigrant girls from 40-plus countries have belonged to the chorus since it began in 2005, and many arrived in Portland after surviving violence, famine, civil war. As one chorus member has described it, “You can’t see what I’ve been through by looking at me.”

* Given the young ages and difficult backgrounds of the chorus members, only their first names are used. NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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Members of the Pihcintu Multicultural Chorus perform before an audience including Little Amal, a towering puppet representing displaced children everywhere, who “attended” via a live stream from Turkey. The Portland, Maine, concert was the only U.S. venue for Little Amal’s 5,000-mile trek across Europe to call attention to the plight of migrant children. | 109

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Where for some people the phrases “migrant children” and “asylum seekers” may conjure up images of walls, or masses pressing against borders, Fullam sees faces and names. He knows the stories of everyone in the chorus—what happened to them before, and what struggles they may continue to face. “They have such courage and resilience,” he says. He recalls one girl who was carried by her aunt while escaping a fire fight because her mother was already carrying two of her younger siblings, all of them falling on the ground and crawling through blood. “When she came here and found the chorus, she was this tough, hard kid with every reason to be that,” he says. “And I saw her transform into this warm, loving, embracing woman she is today.” As the chorus members are getting ready for their performance, Little Amal is 5,000 miles away, in the small Turkish city of Urla. She is nine days into “The Walk,” a five-month trek that will not finish until November, when she arrives in England. In between, Little Amal will visit more than 100 towns and cities; in each, she will be greeted with events, music, and crowds responding to a message of “Do not forget about us. Do not turn away.” The only live-music event in America is happening right here, today, on a small stage with fishing boats passing by just beyond the glass. Pihcintu singers dressed in pink T-shirts will sing to a packed room as a towering screen shows Little Amal listening in the dark Turkish night. Over the next few hours, more chorus members arrive. The last one, Elizabeth, races in just before showtime—“I ran from work,” she says. After the first early run-through and sound check, I see a group of the girls outside on the deck, arms locked across their backs, kicking their legs high, laughing as they dance and sing. In a short while, the song they wrote for Little Amal will speak of sadness and longing, but now their voices are happy, and mingle with the cries of gulls wheeling by. Alexandra Aron, founder of the Remote Theater Project in New York, who has been in Portland rehearsing and directing this segment of The Walk, could have chosen anywhere to connect with Little Amal. She came to Portland because it’s one of the most welcoming places for asylum seekers in the U.S., she says. “And when I learned about Pihcintu, it became clear that Portland was the ideal city. It was powerful to connect the girls with Amal.” NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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By 2 p.m. the chairs are filled, and people stand along the walls. Many wear red shirts that read “The Power of Welcome.” Little Amal, the sky dark around her, fills the screen. In his career as a singer-songwriter, Fullam has written hundreds of songs and performed on some of the most legendary folk stages in the country. But the words to today’s opener, “Song for Amal,” were written by six Pihcintu members gathered in a room where he had placed a whiteboard and asked them to reach out to a child searching for her mother. Kaylee holds the microphone, closes her eyes and begins to sing. Feeling alone, without a home how will you know where to go? We know your pain we have been there we know your loneliness and despair… And the chorus joins in: Amal, Amal, Amal can you hear? Amal, Amal, Amal, have no fear We will be there every step of the way We will be with you every day Until you find your way home. On the screen, Little Amal’s hands reach up and cover her heart. “One day when I tell my own children about this time, I will tell them that Pihcintu is the best thing I’ve ever done.” —Elsie, age 18, from Burundi

hen Con Fullam tells the stories of how the girls in the chorus came to Maine, it’s as though he’s turning the pages of a family album. But when he’s asked how many of them know his story, it seems to be a question he hasn’t thought about before. “Very few,” he finally says. “Very, very few.” Fullam grew up in rural Maine, a place so distant from his singers’ homelands they may as well have been on different planets. But this they shared, he says: “I know what it’s like to lose something that’s very dear to you and have no control over it.” When he was 5, his father, a beloved Colby College history professor, collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was only 48. The family lived on a farm in Sidney, a small town outside Waterville. His father had been

OPPOSITE:

Scenes from Pihcintu’s Juneteenth appearance in Bar Harbor with cellist Yo-Yo Ma (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT): Kaylee and Elsie leading a joyful finale of “This Little Light of Mine”; 13-year-old Shy, a singer with a voice that belies her years; Yoselin performing her first-ever solo, “Hallelujah,” which brought the audience to its feet; Marciline, who came to Maine from Congo in 2019 after a dangerous 13,000-mile trek; Elsie, Brenda, and Janelle, embodying the “sisters” bond among the chorus, something vital to the members’ ability to heal the wounds of their pasts. | 111

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RUBY Age 14, from Maine (born to a Jamaican father and an Irish mother, Ruby says she’s “Jamairish”). “Pihcintu makes me feel like I have older sisters. When we get nervous, we squeeze each other’s hands. I just have to breathe and not look at the audience.”

NATALIA Age 13, from Angola. “My original language is Portuguese. When I came here, I didn’t understand anything people were saying. If you stay silent, people will not know your stories. Singing is a way everyone can understand.”

YOSELIN Age 15, from Honduras. “I had never done a solo before ‘Hallelujah.’ I did not think I could do it. When I saw the video afterward, I thought that was really good! I’m not afraid anymore. I sing with my heart.”

BRENDA Age 21, from Sudan; spent nine years in a refugee camp. Now she’s studying to be a nurse. “My mother raised seven of us by herself. Growing up, we just thought about surviving. There was always danger. We never knew when our next meal would be.”

FATIMAH Age 17, from Iraq; longtime chorus member whose final appearance was the Little Amal concert. She once said, “I feel as though when someone hears our songs, that they are going to be touched in some way and they are going to make a change.”

KATHY Age 22, from Vietnam; joined Pihcintu at age 8. A college graduate, she’s headed to California to pursue a music career. “I looked up to the older girls. They were so inspirational. I’ve had so much performance experience now; it’s really shaped me.”

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the Democratic nominee to challenge Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and the effort had left him exhausted physically and financially. “My father was a respected and revered member of the community, and the entire town just stood up and helped us get through,” Fullam says. “We were Catholics, and every Friday Bill the fish man gave us fish. If we needed anything repaired, somebody always showed up. If there was anything we needed, the community found a way to make sure we had it. We had no money. The bank actually forgave the mortgage on the farm. It had such an impact on me as a young kid to feel all this support and love around me. To this day, this is what dictates a lot of who I am and how I think about life. I have always looked for ways to pay that forward in any way I can.” After his father’s death, his mother moved the family to Waterville, where she became a schoolteacher, and Fullam became a student for whom a C was a success. But he did have a gift for music. He had learned the ukulele from his father, and his mother, brother, and sister all played music. Music was how he found his way through the tragedy. “I had a pretty hard time,” he says. “I was the only kid I knew that didn’t have a father. I was that kid, but being that kid isn’t what you wish to be. The ukulele gave me a way to define myself, [to show] that I was somebody. I remember standing up in front of my second grade class and playing ‘Sink the Bismarck,’ and it was a big moment for me.” Fullam started his first band at age 14 and never looked back. He played at Maine ski resorts, then found his way in the early ’70s to New York’s folk and blues clubs. He began writing songs for major music publishing houses, churning out hundreds of tunes on demand, but in time he came back to Maine. There, he continued writing songs—including “The Maine Christmas Song,” which fills the state’s airwaves every December—as well as producing music and a children’s television show for PBS. In the early 2000s, there was an inf lux of African immigrants in Lewiston and Portland, and what struck Fullam was how when they arrived they had no voice. “Literally,” he says. “They were strangers, and they did not speak the language. I thought if I formed a chorus, it could help them to learn English. And to feel NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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part of a family. And to help them regain their sense of self and a sense of competence.” On a cold, windy, rainy Saturday in November 2004, Fullam held an audition at a Portland school. “And four kids showed up,” he says. “I wondered if it was the weather or just a bad idea. Fortunately, teachers at the school told me to pursue it, and they introduced me to a nun at Sacred Heart, a school that had a lot of refugee children. I went there and asked if any kids liked to sing, and they all raised their hands. We went from four kids to 40. And word got out.” The chorus needed a name. “Every name I came up with, like ‘Rainbow Chorus,’ either wasn’t very good or somebody else already had it,” he says. “So I went to the Portland Public Library and I got out the Passamaquoddy dictionary. I don’t know why I was driven to do that, but I did. And I opened it to a page and it said ‘Pihcintu: When we sing, our voices carry far.’ I thought, there it is. How could I have done better?” Friends brought friends into the chorus. Sisters brought sisters. Fullam auditioned everyone, often in front of other chorus members so that there would be a challenge and a feeling of achievement. Nobody ever failed an audition. “I’ve never worried about the perfection of this chorus,” he says. “It’s not what the chorus is about. Even if you’re tone-challenged or pitchchallenged, the more you’re surrounded by kids who have pitch, the more you find it.” They sang at local churches, schools, museums. Word spread. In the whitest state in the nation, here was this buoyant group of young people from war-torn countries singing of hope and peace, with a lean, white-haired guitar player leading them through the songs. “We started to gain some kind of notoriety,” he says. And then came the break that every artist hopes for. On the morning of Christmas Eve 2015, the Today show aired six minutes of the chorus singing and its members talking about what it meant to them. “The girls knew it was a big deal, but also not really,” Fullam says. “They don’t watch the show because they are going to school. But they were home Christmas Eve. When they saw themselves on the Today show and when their parents saw them, they got the idea this was a momentous moment. When I watched, the

Many of the chorus members arrived in Portland after surviving violence, famine, civil war. As one member has put it, “You can’t see what I’ve been through by looking at me.”

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The Rescuers A returning soldier. An abandoned dog. Together, they would run all the way home. B Y E M I LY B R A D L E Y

Before or after going on a run together, Jeff and Rollie would often have a playful sparring session in their New Hampshire backyard, as in this 2005 photo, taken six months after Jeff got out of the Army.

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hen my future husband returned from Operation Iraqi Freedom, he set out to get a “guard dog” because hunters had trespassed on his land. It was 2003. Jeff was a 25-yearold West Point graduate with a jawline of edges. I did not know him yet, but in pictures his brown hair is tightly clipped. His shoulders are puffed up from the weights he pressed overseas to distract himself from the sandstorms and the constant threat of enemy fire. The way the story goes, Jeff went to a kill shelter outside Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. “I need a guard dog,” he told the shelter manager. A dozen dogs barked and lunged at the chain link gate. Jeff pointed to a silent pup whose eyes were as sunken as the spaces between his ribs. “That one, in the corner.” “You sure?” the manager asked. “Bad case of worms.” Jeff locked eyes with the golden mix. “I’ll take him.” He handed over 15 dollars cash. The dog, Rollie, barreled straight for Jeff ’s red pickup truck. With the grace—or fear—of a gazelle, he leapt onto the front seat. His swiftness appealed to Jeff, who, like most veterans, had come home with reasons to run.

Jeff, then an Army first lieutenant, in the Kuwaiti desert before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Jeff reached for the doorknob. “Be careful when you leave—he’ll push right past you. He hates being left behind.” Being left behind was, indeed, Rollie’s primary preoccupation. When he sensed exiting, he positioned himself on the doormat, lying in wait. Once before leaving for a dinner party, I forgot to block Rollie. He f lew between my gold heels and darted into the backyard. “Damn it!” “Don’t yell,” Jeff said. “He’ll think you’re mad at him.” I f lopped onto the couch, annoyed, because I knew Jeff would wait for Rollie to come back before we left. An hour later, after we’d missed the entrée, Rollie bounced over the stone wall with foul-smelling black tar across his back. He’d rolled in dead possum. I rolled my eyes. Jeff rolled up his sleeves and turned on the hose. “Never leave a soldier behind.”

A L L P H O TO S C O U R T E S Y O F E M I LY B R A D L E Y

And run they did. Rollie, who looked like a golden retriever

but was built like a Lab, gained strength as they ran. Over Missouri hills and, later, wooded New Hampshire trails, and for more than a decade, Jeff and Rollie ran together daily, their brotherhood as strong as their legs. By the time I met Rollie, he and Jeff had run more than 1,000 miles. It was 2005. Jeff had been discharged from the Army, and I was in my last year of college, naïve to the emotional impact of combat. It was a Friday night. Behind a glass door, a f lash of fur ran circles around his tail like a child’s windup toy. “He likes you,” Jeff said. When Rollie stopped spinning, I could see that he had eyes the color of hickory, a coat as thick as wool and as blond as my own hair, and the very non-guard-dog look of a Christmas-card pup. He picked up a stuffed hedgehog toy and cocked his head to the side, cautious but inquisitive. It was clear that Jeff had chosen a companion, not a protector. NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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For years, I was jealous of Rollie—that Jeff never got mad

at him, that his vet appointments made the calendar when date nights did not, that the pitter-patter of his toenails could instantly lighten Jeff ’s mood. Mostly, that they comforted each other in a way I could not. When Rollie ran in his sleep—paws scratching at our farmhouse wall, voice whimpering—Jeff would bend down, scratch his ear, and whisper, “Hey guy, it’s OK.” Rollie would start awake, eyes wide, then roll over, and sigh deeply. When Jeff startled from a dream of Nasiriyah—forehead sweating, forearms tensed—he would scoop Rollie up, carry him to the maroon recliner, and splay all 60 pounds of sleeping dog across his chest. Their breath synced. They were as their bodies insisted: yin and yang, stray and soldier, rescued and rescuer. The psychological term for this phenomenon is coregulation—the process by which two beings regulate their | 115

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nervous systems together, often resulting in calm. I knew Jeff and Rollie needed each other, but on the nights when they slept bellies-up in the chair, at ease, I didn’t fully comprehend the therapeutic value. I just lay alone in bed feeling shut out and helpless, wondering who rescued who. When Rollie was 8, after Jeff and I had been married for

three years, he tore a ligament in his left knee on a run. He hobbled up the driveway, stoically ignoring his injury. But the limp was severe. Jeff whisked him into the red truck and drove directly to the emergency vet. Rollie came home with shaved hindquarters, anti-inf lammatory medication, and rehab orders. Jeff ’s pace had slowed at that point, too—he was 35— but his dedication to their ritual had not. In the time they would normally run, Jeff wrote and published the children’s book Running with Rollie. In it, a soldier and his dog run and run and run. “Is it autobiographical?” the local children’s librarian asked Jeff after he read the picture book at story time. Fifteen preschoolers made a horseshoe around him. He looked at me nervously. “Not exactly.” Jeff patted Rollie, whose leg had healed enough to jog. “It’s inspired by true events.” He talked about how hard it was to watch soldiers return home to an empty house, but he did not mention veteran suicide rates or the invisible wounds from which both he and Rollie ran. He just hung on to Rollie’s leash. Later that afternoon, I found Jeff asleep on the hammock. Rollie covered him like a blanket. As they swayed in the breeze, I began to understand the necessity of their bond—that Jeff meant safety to Rollie, and Rollie made something safe in Jeff that I would never fully access. I still envied their closeness, but I was also grateful for how each so clearly served the other, and me. Jeff planned the run routes, but Rollie was the trailblazer, the one who opened the closed-off territory of Jeff ’s heart. One mile, one tongue-heavy breath at a time, he made Jeff secure enough to trust and love, again. And he gave me a map. One morning, as Jeff adjusted Rollie’s collar for a slow

jog, Rollie did not leap for the door. He laid his head on the linoleum floor and looked away. “No run today, guy? ” Jeff asked, concerned. Rollie whimpered. Drool pooled on the floor. Out of his left jawbone, a lump the size of a grape had grown. “Metastatic melanoma,” the vet said the next day. Rollie was 13. The vet outlined the options: We could pursue chemo, or a new protocol, but Rollie was old and the side effects could be worse than the cancer. “We have to try,” Jeff said. There was something so primal in his tone that, even though I considered the course 116 |

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Jeff planned the run routes, but Rollie was the trailblazer, the one who opened the closed-off territory of Jeff’s heart. futile, I agreed. He could not control the deaths overseas, but he could control this one. And Jeff, I knew, hated being left behind. The treatment worked for a few months. During this time,

Jeff walked a wooden-legged Rollie down the plastic stair ramp, just past the mailbox, and back again. “It’s OK, guy,” Jeff said when Rollie’s legs started to buckle under him. Rollie turned his head away, seemingly embarrassed by his immobility. One by one, Jeff placed Rollie’s paws in front of each other to give him the dignity of walking. But it was not long before Jeff had to carry him out to pee. When Rollie’s legs were too spindly to stand and he stopped drinking water, Jeff arranged for the vet to come to our house. He smoothed the Army poncho liners that lined the white carpet of our bedroom, turned on a fan, and grabbed a stuffed hedgehog. He lay belly-down on the floor next to Rollie, recalling the early miles they logged—under the St. Louis arch, around creeks, through marshes. He whispered about the time a bone-thin, brand-new-to-Jeff Rollie had sprinted across Route 66 and how, through three NEWENGLAND.COM

9/9/21 11:29 AM

lanes of traffic and up a mountain, Jeff had run after him. I paced outside the bedroom, peering in occasionally but never interrupting. Inside, Jeff cradled Rollie’s long, white muzzle in his lap. They sat still. Side by side, they did not try to outrun grief. Later that day, Jeff took off Rollie’s dog tags. Jeff gave Rollie a proper soldier’s burial. It was a clear

July day. Under a banner of blue sky, the grass of the pet cemetery was shorn close, like Arlington’s. A tent shaded the grave. Jeff wore his black sneakers and held Running with Rollie. From a tiny Bible he had carried in his breast pocket through Iraq, Jeff read scripture. Taps played in the background. I squeezed Jeff ’s hand and did what Rollie had done: held space for someone else’s pain.

The bugles sounded. Jeff covered Rollie’s urn with an Army bandana, lowered it into the earth, and shoveled soft layers of dirt on top. A tear welled in Jeff ’s eye and his breath quickened. Rollie would have nuzzled his knee, so I knelt beside Jeff. I was f looded with gratitude that Rollie had given me a blueprint for how to comfort Jeff. Rollie’s headstone glinted in the sun. Two paw prints were etched in the granite as though he had sprinted right across it. And just below the tracks, in the center of the stone, was the epigraph Jeff chose to honor Rollie’s life: Born to run. But I know now, years later, that the phrase told only half of the story. While Rollie certainly was born to run, his legacy was just the opposite. In the end, he taught us all how to stay.

opposite :

The two running buddies at rest during the summer of 2016, in between Rollie’s cancer treatments. this page : Rollie looks out at the ocean in York, Maine, in a moment from his many truck rides with Jeff.

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CONVERSATIONS

JILL LEPORE

ON EMBRACING HISTORY AS HARD WORK.

I N T E RV I E W BY J O E K EO H A N E

Jill Lepore is a native New Englander, born in West Boylston, Massachusetts, and descended from immigrants. Her grandparents came to the country from Italy, fleeing poverty. In 1924—the same year Congress passed legislation banning immigrants like them—they gave birth to a son, whom they named Amerigo. He would become a school principal. And his youngest child, Jill, would become one of this country’s foremost historians. Theirs is an American story. One of many. A Harvard professor, author, and longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, Lepore is a leading proponent for the idea of studying national history. To her, that doesn’t mean studying only select events or the lives of individual figures. And it certainly doesn’t mean just highlighting parts of history that support one partisan ideology or another. Instead, it calls for reckoning with the entirety of the thing to tell a national story that is both true and binding in this country of immigrants, “a composite nation,” as Frederick Douglass called it. And this is no mere academic concern: As Lepore writes in These Truths, her 2018 massive, acclaimed history of the United States, “Nations, to make sense of themselves, need a kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.” I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y DA N W I L L I A M S

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The sort of national history Lepore practices doesn’t dodge hard questions, doesn’t turn away from atrocities and hypocrisies. But nor does it dismiss the beauty and brilliance and vision of America’s founding ideals. The story of America is, for her, its struggle to meet the lofty promise laid out in the Declaration of Independence. In her book This America: The Case for the Nation, she writes, “A nation founded on ideals, universal truths, also opens itself up to charges of hypocrisy at every turn. Those charges do not lie outside the plot of the story of America, or underneath it. They are its plot, the history on which any 21st-century case for the American nation has to rest, a history of struggle and agony and courage and progress.” We spoke by phone earlier this year, a few months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Joe Keohane: So, Jill, how did you

spend Inauguration Day? Jill Lepore: I watched it on TV, live, with my family—just like we watched the insurrection at the Capitol, live.

ascertain precisely why we do it?” And seeing the Capitol, two weeks after the insurrection, in this beautiful way. Plus, Amanda Gordon. Our TV room was hushed.

J.K.: I spent the day holding my

J.K.: What’s it been like to experience

breath, and then poured a gigantic bourbon when it was over. That’s my usual tradition. Do you have any personal traditions or practices for inauguration days? J.L.: I don’t have any traditions. I’m not a great lover of pomp. I get it—the work it does—but it’s not for me. Usually I don’t watch. I’ve only been to one: Obama’s second. I do like reading the inaugural addresses, though, and I try to read my favorites every once in a while. I’ve often asked students to write them, for an assignment. J.K.: What did you think of Biden’s

speech?

J.L: I actually found the Biden address

really moving. It made me think a lot about Lincoln’s first: “Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to 120 |

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the past few years in American politics? Do you as a historian process it differently than other people might? J.L: Even in boring times, I have the sense of living on a timeline: knowing where we are relative to events of the past, and constantly reorienting myself along that sense of chronology and change over time. That’s just a professional hazard. But this last year and a half—even the past few years, arguably—have been so topsy-turvy, and so cluttered with experiences that most of us have not had before, that I think everyone now, not just historians, has that sense of living in a moment in historical time, and being keenly, acutely, and I think quite painfully aware of the strangeness of change over time. J.K.: You say it’s a “professional

hazard,” having this sense of living on a timeline. What do you mean by that?

J.L.: I say in the beginning of my book

These Truths that the past is a burden and you carry it with you everywhere, even if you don’t know that you’re carrying it. And I think one of the pieces of business—essential and urgent pieces of moral work—of the Black Lives Matter movement has been more people realizing how heavy that burden is, and more of a sense of the shared burden. But if you’re an American political historian, there’s that sense that we haven’t escaped the past, we cannot escape the past, we have to reckon with the past. That’s the work of teaching, and that’s the work of writing. And if that now seems like more of an urgent public project to more people who haven’t been paying attention, that’s a good thing. But it’s also hard. It’s difficult.

J.K.: You’ve been teaching since the

mid-’90s. Have you seen a shift in your students’ attitudes? Especially over the past few years, with the rise of the post-fact media ecosystem and the hardening of ideological lines—the idea that something is true because it lines up with what one believes? J.L.: So, I teach this course on the history of evidence at Harvard Law School that involves law school students, and students from the college, and some graduate students in the history program. The first time I taught it was maybe eight years ago. As an icebreaker, I asked everyone to describe a body of evidence that they really wished they had in front of them, and why. And it was fascinating because the law school students all came up with bodies of evidence that could be useful to them in a piece of advocacy that they were engaged with. For instance, there was a student who was interested in private prisons, and he wished that he had the interoffice memos of this big corporation that owns a ton of NEWENGLAND.COM

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prisons about the decisions it made about punishments within those prisons. But all the students from the humanities said, like, “I wish that Emily Dickinson had kept a diary so that I could find out what she was really thinking.” J.K.: It feels like the difference

between advocacy and curiosity. The latter requires a certain openness. J.L.: Right. And it was a great way to kind of talk about what the rules of evidence are in different realms of knowledge. As an epidemiologist, you don’t frame an experiment to prove that the vaccine that you want to sell works, right? You frame an experiment to find out whether it works or doesn’t work. There is a method. Evidence is not something that you go to seek out to prove what you already believe. It’s something 122 |

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that you collect and inspect in order to find out what’s true. J.K.: How do you get young historians

to cultivate the proper mind-set at a time like this? J.L: Just to kind of push back a little on your question, I don’t think that our students have changed, that they are coming into every position that they hold closed to counterevidence and raring for a fight or not believing that anything can be true. I think there are certain tics they have that maybe are problems for historical thinking, but they’re not worse tics than other generations would have had. They’re just different tics. One of them is what I call playing the game of “spot the bias.” A lot of young people are instructed in high school—across disciplines, across the curriculum—that their objective when

they read something is to spot the bias in it, and that that’s all they have to do. So you give them something to read, and their critique is how it’s biased. But that’s just the beginning of examining it, right? You also have to figure out, What did I learn from this that I didn’t know? What do I know now that I didn’t know before? How is this person arguing? Is there beauty to be found here? [Young people] have been taught that the big sophisticated intellectual move is to spot the bias of something, but it’s like you’ve just put the key in the ignition. Of course, you have to put the key in the ignition to go somewhere, but we’re not done with the journey yet. [Laughs.] We haven’t even left the driveway! J.K.: This sort of thinking is obviously

a much broader social issue—I don’t mean to just pick on students.

K AYA N A SZ Y M C Z A K

I think we call a lot of things ‘history’ that aren’t history. A lot of stuff that we call ‘history’ is really folklore, myth, or tourism.

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J.L.: It’s a failure of the grown-ups

if this is how young people think they should approach the world of knowledge.

J.K.: You’ve written repeatedly

about the need for nations to have an agreed-upon past. But you also wrote this: “A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.” What’s a more productive way to have that fight? Especially in the case of our own nation, when the right seems so motivated by nostalgia about the past, and the left feels total pessimism toward it. J.L.: I think that’s a weird false dualism, to say either Things were always perfect or The whole story of the country is an atrocity. That can’t be the answer. That’s why we keep going through these crazy cycles of No, you’re wrong, Mayberry was a racist hellhole! and No, you’re wrong, Mayberry was full of good people who loved puppies and God’s daisy chains! There’s just no way that you would think about any human being that way. You might have a brother who you deeply love, but you also think he is often a complete ass. And yet he’s also wonderfully generous in some contexts. History is not less complicated than humans are. It’s way more complicated, because it’s a whole aggregation of humans. J.K.: Why do people want the past to

be simple? Why does America have to be either an immaculate conception or a racist hellhole? J.L.: I’m not sure I know. And I think the answer is different for 124 |

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different people. I do think the sort of triumphalist narrative does such incredible violence to the suffering of so many people that it’s very easy to get outraged by it. It’s very easy to say, How can you swoon at the American flag when you think about the scale of the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the continued struggles of native nations for sovereignty, and the continued health outcome inequalities? I totally get being really furious about that.

We need a better history, and we need a fuller history, and we need a harder history. It needs to be hard. It needs to be hard to think about, because it is hard to think about.

J.K.: So, what do we need to get

us away from that endless tugof-war between pessimism and triumphalism? J.L.: We need a better history, and we need a fuller history, and we need a harder history. It needs to be hard. It needs to be hard to think about, because it is hard to think about. I think we call a lot of things “history” that aren’t history. A lot of stuff that we call “history” is really folklore, myth, or tourism. History is a humanistic discipline that requires an extraordinary amount of intellectual exertion and accumulation of knowledge. And it’s important, even though it’s been packaged as

something that you could just pick up at the store, buying a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence or a tricornered hat. That’s not history; that’s just tourism. I think we confuse the two. But the study of history is hard, and it can often be painful. J.K.: You had a quote in These

Truths from Archibald MacLeish: “Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something a nation should be doing.” I think the idea that America was near perfect when it was founded really undersells the amount of work citizens need to do to hold it together. J.L.: Yeah. Yeah. J.K. Knowing what you know, and

having studied what you’ve studied, how sound is the foundation of this country? J.L.: I sometimes tell the story about how in 1987 Thurgood Marshall spoke on the occasion of the bicentennial of the Constitution. And he basically said, Look, I’m just going to refuse to celebrate that moment in 1787. I can’t celebrate the founding moment as if there’s some kind of frozen time there that we should venerate. Veneration is, first of all, bad for democracy. But also this is the Constitution that implicitly sanctioned slavery through the three-fifths clause, and failed to abolish the slave trade. So what I’m going to celebrate, Marshall said, is the 200 years that have happened since—and all of the struggle to realize the promise of that Constitution. That’s how I feel when asked questions about the foundation. It’s not that there’s nothing there, but the strength lies in the whole frame, which is still being built. It’s not unassailable. I think there’s a great deal of weakness and fragility, frankly, in the structure at the moment. But I certainly don’t think it’s beyond repair. NEWENGLAND.COM

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Travel

RESOURCES

(Continued from p. 87)

MASSACHUSETTS ★ CASTLEBERRY FAIRS & FESTIVALS,

Worcester, Topsfield, Wilmington, and Hanover. Castleberry’s juried art and craft fairs are some of the best-attended in New England. For the holiday season, its efforts are focused on Massachusetts, where four events including the 26th annual, 250-vendor Castleberry Faire in Wilmington make holiday shopping less of a chore and more of an adventure. 11/6–11/7, Worcester; 11/12–11/14, Topsfield; 11/26–11/28, Wilmington; 12/4–12/5, Hanover. castleberryfairs.com ★ CRAFTBOSTON HOLIDAY, online. The Society of Arts & Crafts was founded in 1897, the first American organization of its kind, which in turn organized the first formal crafts exhibition on these shores. Now, more than 100 years later, it’s still running our region’s granddaddy holiday event—though this year, as in 2020, the browsing and buying of toptier, giftable handcrafts will happen online. 11/12–1/30. societyofcrafts.com ★ FRUITLANDS HOLIDAY ARTISAN

Actually Fly a bird!

MARKET, Harvard. Quality juried crafts, museum exhibits, and gorgeous views are among the lures for this festive event at Fruitlands Museum, a 210-acre Trustees property that includes the nation’s first Shaker museum, a Native American museum, and an art museum. One price covers both the market and museum admission, so bring the family and make a day of it. Pre-registration strongly recommended. 12/4–12/5. thetrustees.org

★ OLD DEERFIELD HOLIDAY SAMPLER,

Photo: Betsy Holland

Touch the wild in a way you never dreamed MAKES possible! Located A GREAT in the beautiful, GIFT! accessible hillcountry of Southern NH.

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YK1121_Travel_Listings_REV.indd 128

West Spring field. More than 240 local and national artists make for a merry showcase of traditional crafts and holiday decorations—carved Santas, ornaments, candles, and so on. Be sure to present your parking receipt at the information booth to receive BOGO admission to 2022’s Spring Sampler. 11/20–11/21. deerfield-craft.org

★ PARADISE CITY ARTS FESTIVAL,

Marlborough. It’s a visual feast when 175 best-in-class artisans converge for this annual kickoff to the holiday treasurehunting season. It takes more than talent to earn a spot among them: These folks create fashions, furnishings, and fine art with such imaginative style, you won’t see work like theirs duplicated. 11/19– 11/21. festivals.paradisecityarts.com ♦ SALMON FALLS GALLERY, Shelburne Falls. The walls, shelves, and pedestals in this sprawling, barnlike gallery routinely sport new work by close to 100 artisans—all living and working within a 50-mile radius, including Shelburne

Falls’ own glass artist extraordinaire, Josh Simpson. salmonfallsgallery.com ♦ SAWMILL RIVER ARTS, Montague. “Local” is the watchword at this winsome little co-op, whose 15 members and 18 guest artisans hail exclusively from Western Mass. The other draw is its location, in the picturesque Montague Bookmill, home to one of the state’s best used-book shops. Throw in the indie record store Turn It Up!, and enjoy hours of buy-local bliss. sawmillriverarts.com ★ SNOW FARM ANNUAL SECONDS SALE,

Williamsburg. A major fund-raiser for this school of traditional crafts, the highly anticipated “seconds” sale invites savvy shoppers to adopt those slight misfits, artist oopses, and abandoned experiments that are part of the artistic process and still—to the untrained eye or even to the discriminating one—as worthy as “firsts” (which will also be featured in the sale). Fridays–Sundays 11/12–11/28. snowfarm.org ★ SOWA WINTER FESTIVAL, Boston. Discover a trove of handmade treasures in SoWa, the city’s arts and design district, as 100 of the region’s makers and specialty-food vendors gather at the SoWa Power Station to help holiday shoppers fill their bags. Food, winter cocktails, and seasonal craft brews and wines are also available for the partaking. 12/3–12/12. sowaboston.com/sowawinter-festival ♦★ WESTERN AVENUE STUDIOS, Lowell. A sterling example of how New England’s industrial past can incubate its creative future, this old mill building is now the bustling domain of more than 350 artists and makers. Come see what they’re up to during the Holiday Art Market shopping event (12/4 and 12/11), or swing by the year-round Loading Dock Gallery and browse its stock of jewelry, prints, pottery, and more. westernavenuestudios.com ♦★ WORCESTER CENTER FOR CRAFTS,

Worcester. Yes, you can buy artisanquality, American-made gifts for less than $50. The Gallery Store at this nonprofit, community-based arts organization seeks out emerging and established ceramic, fiber, paper, wood, and jewelry artists whose work includes both affordable pieces and definite splurges. And mark your calendar for the center’s annual Holiday Festival of Crafts (11/26–11/28), which brings together an estimated 60 artisans with an enthusiastic audience of buyers. worcestercraftcenter.org

NEW HAMPSHIRE ♦ EXETER FINE CRAFTS, Exeter. For more

than half a century, this nonprofit organization has been working to keep

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traditional handcrafted art a visible and vital part of the community. Visit its retail gallery in the heart of downtown Exeter to peruse wares from northern New England artists, such as the richly textured pottery of Massachusetts’s Roger Cramer and the graceful beachstone jewelry of New Hampshire’s Blair LaBella. exeterfinecrafts.com

ACADIA

STELL AR ANYTIME OF YEAR This Stay. Any Stay. Stay with Us.

★ GREAT NEW ENGLAND CRAFT & ARTISAN SHOWS, Hampton and Milford. Door prizes, demos, and live music are further enticements to browse these two holiday shows filled with artisan foods, candles, soaps, jewelry, metal art, and everything else to help fill up Santa’s gift bag. Holiday Craft & Artisan Show, 11/20 (Hampton); Holiday Shopping Extravaganza, 12/10–12/11 (Milford). gnecraftartisanshows.com

♦ LEAGUE OF N.H. CRAFTSMEN GALLERIES, Center Sandwich, Concord,

Hooksett, Littleton, Meredith, Nashua, and North Conway. Famed for its annual summer fair, which is one of the nation’s oldest craft fairs and draws some 25,000 visitors, the League of N.H. Craftsmen puts a mind-boggling array of creations from its 700-plus members on display year-round at a collection of retail galleries that sprawl from the White Mountains to the Merrimack Valley, as well as in its online store. nhcrafts.org

★ SEACOAST ARTISANS HOLIDAY FINE ARTS & CRAFT SHOW, North Hampton. This 22nd annual yuletide showcase not only delivers a range of locally made art, fashion, and home decor but also teams up with Meals 4 Kids, a program run by the hunger …relief nonprofit Gather to help feed youngsters around the Seacoast. 11/20. seacoastartisansshows.com

Gift Cards available for the Holidays. w w w. b a r h a r b o r h o s p i t a l i t y g r o u p . c o m

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INN to INN WALKING TOUR

★ SILVER BELLS CRAFT FAIR & HOLLY JOLLY CRAFT FAIR, Tilton and Nashua. Stocked with a merry mix of crafts and products from New England and beyond, and with lots of affordable treasures to find, these shows mark the annual yearend wrap-up for veteran New Hampshire craft show producer Joyce Endee’s busy calendar of events. 11/6–11/7, Tilton; 12/11, Nashua. joycescraftshows.com

RHODE ISLAND ★ ART PROVIDENCE SHOW, Providence.

When only ingeniously designed, one-of-a-kind gifts will do, spend a fall weekend buying direct from New England’s top artisans. Intensely juried, this high-end marketplace features about 150 booths that will inspire you to reconsider how you adorn your home, life, and self. 11/12–12/14. artprovidenceshow.com

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021

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★ FIELD OF ARTISANS, South Kingstown

and Pawtucket. From its wide-ranging lineup of 500 New England makers, Field of Artisans curates holiday pop-ups that are eclectic and fun, with handmade gifts for the hard-to-please at all price points. South Kingstown shows are at Whalers Brewing, and Pawtucket shows are at The Guild, so you can sip a pint as you browse. Sundays 11/21–12/19, South Kingstown; 12/4–12/5, Pawtucket. fieldofartisans.com

★ FOUNDRY ARTISTS ASSOCIATION

NewEnglandInnsandResorts.com purchased gift cards do not expire, promotional gift cards are valid for one year

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HOLIDAY SHOW, Pawtucket. For nearly four decades, this show and silent auction has tapped an impressive roster of artisans for its wares—paintings, photos, jewelry, leather goods, woodcrafts, and more. Of course, it helps to have all those RISD grads in your backyard. 12/2–12/5 and 12/10–12/12. foundryshow.com ♦ HARBOR VIEW ARTISANS, Wickford. There’s always a creator behind the counter at this harborside co-op gallery, and meeting the person behind the work—be it a local potter, painter, woodworker, or silversmith—adds meaning to gift-giving. Support 20-plus artisans, whose leap of faith in spring 2021 brought this coastalchic shop to life. Facebook ♦ LA GALERÍA DEL PUEBLO, Central Falls. Members of Rhode Island Latino Arts’ network of artists show their work inside this 1900 colonial house turned cultural hub. During the holidays, support Latinx makers who live in Rhode Island when you shop for jewelry, hand-embroidered clothing, and art at La Tiendita @ La Galería pop-ups. rilatinoarts.org

♦ MILLS CREEK NATURAL MARKET,

Experience. Together. Everything you need for a perfect vacation is right here. Adventure, luxury, and absolute relaxation.

Charlestown. A charming post-and-beam barn is the backdrop for this eco-inflected gift shop, whose unique wares by 150-plus local artists and fair-trade makers include organic clothing, beeswax candles, stained glass, framed art, and leather journals. millscreekmarket.com ♦ OHANGA, Newport and Cranston. Originally a digital platform for connecting Rhode Island creatives with a community of fans, Ohanga opened its first physical location in May 2021 in Newport’s Brick Market Place, followed by a seasonal pop-up this fall at Cranston’s Garden City Center. Head to these one-stop destinations for handmade-in-RI jewelry, textiles, ceramics, charcuterie boards, and wall art large and small. ohanga.com ★ WATERFIRE ARTS CENTER INDOOR

866.400.7551

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HOLIDAY ARTMART, Providence. Spend Small Business Saturday at this arts bazaar, where the array of handcrafted offerings is testament to the capital city’s love and support for all things creative. The WaterFire Store is open, too, for souvenirs celebrating Providence’s signature art installation: Proceeds help keep the fires burning. 11/27. waterfire.org

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9/15/21 3:58 PM

RESOURCES

VERMONT

♦ FROG HOLLOW VERMONT CRAFT

♦ ARTISANS’ GALLERY, Waitsfield. Set in

the nation’s first state craft center in 1975, Frog Hollow exhibits the work of more than 200 Green Mountain State artisans on a rotating basis and ranks as one of Vermont’s largest nonprofit arts institutions. In addition to offering an endless array of locally created arts and crafts for sale, it also hosts artist demonstrations, lectures, and regular curated shows. froghollow.org ♦ GALLERY AT THE VAULT, Spring field. With “VAULT” standing for “Visual Art Using Local Talent,” this nonprofit gallery in Springfield’s historic 1908 Victorian Bank Block helped breathe new life into downtown when it opened back in 2001. Two decades on, it hums with the color and beauty of blown glass, origami, painted scarves, pottery, and more, all made by 160 local and regional artisans. galleryvault.org

an 1830s storefront in historic Waitsfield Village, this cheery artists’ co-op represents 150-plus Vermonters whose work spans everything from hand-built ceramic birdhouses to collages of pressed leaves and flower to brighter-than-life canvases of the Vermont countryside. vtartisansgallery.com ♦ ARTISANS HAND, Montpelier. Founded in 1978, this nationally recognized craft center fills its walls and shelves with wares from more than 140 artisans, including Vermont landscape photos and prints, bowls and cutting boards made from locally harvested wood, and jewelry set with Lake Champlain beach stones. artisanshand.com ♦ COLLECTIVE–THE ART OF CRAFT,

Woodstock. Still run by many of the same artists who launched it in 2006— including founder Marcia Hammond, an acclaimed fiber artist and painter— Collective keeps its lineup fresh with a rotating guest-artist program, while its setting, a picturesque 19th-century stone building, invites lingering. collective-theartofcraft.com

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| Travel

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9/22/21 9:38 AM

(Continued from p. 107)

1986 and 2004 Red Sox happened. Tom Brady’s six Super Bowl wins happened. The Celtics won seven championships, and the Bruins two. The old Boston Garden was torn down. Bill Weld jumped into the Charles River, and then as if by magic all of Boston’s dirty water was made clean. All the while, as the city underwent vast physical, and social, and demographic, and economic upheaval,

a role in eliciting awe,” she replied. “I also wonder if there’s something about the fact that sea turtles are so different from us that could play a role. They are prehistoric creatures that spend almost their entire lives alone. They don’t parent their offspring or form social bonds. They travel thousands of miles and somehow make their way back to the nesting beach where they were born. They live amongst whales and sharks and probably creatures no humans have seen before. Their existence is so utterly different from ours.” As alien as her kind may seem, however, My r t le is familiar. She is the stranger we know. She is part of our personal history, at least those of us who have been seeing her for years. And maybe this is the final clue to why we feel the way we do about her. Staffers I talked to at the aquarium spoke often of the power of multiple generations experiencing Myrtle. A man, such as myself, can take his daughter, as I have, to see an animal that he saw when he was her age. And the animal will be where she’s always been, and she will be about the same. And that, too, is awesome. In a timeless New England Aquarium moment, children Through 50 years here, as peer through a window into Myrtle’s world. everything changed around her, My rtle has stayed constant. Myrtle quietly wheeled, and glided, Almost every tall building in the city and napped, and ate. She is a f ixed was erected during her tenure here, point in the recent history of a dynamic including the Hancock Tower and place, and there is something reassurthe aquarium’s next-door neighbor, ing about watching a creature that has the Harbor Towers. The nearby Cen- been unchanged and untouched durtral Artery was razed and replaced by ing a period of such relentless turbuthe Big Dig and the Greenw ay. The lence. She is a fixed point in the life of Bulger brothers happened. Busing a city that for all its historical import happened. Gay marriage. The Inter- has changed beyond recognition. net. Gentrif ication. The Gardner Rarer still, though, Myrtle is a Museum heist. The marathon bomb- fixed point in the equally tumultuous ing. Kevin White, Ray Flynn, Tom lives of the millions who have come Menino, Marty Walsh, and Boston’s to see her. And it was this that was first female mayor and Black mayor, on my mind as I watched her wheelKim Janey—they all happened. The ing and gliding on that nasty day 132 |

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in April 2021. We were struggling to emerge from the pandemic, and grappling with multiple other crises besides. The year had taken a toll, and had found me feeling intensely nostalgic, which is by no means my default mode. This isn’t uncommon: Psychologists have found that people frequently experience nostalgia in times of intense stress or hardship, or when they feel their lives have become somehow severed from their pasts in a way that keeps the two halves from f itting together as they once did. This sensation might occur because one’s life has changed drastically, or because the world has changed drastically, or both. Certainly that was 2020 for most of us. Nostalgia can remind us of people we love, or memories we cherish, or episodes when we overcame something and became stronger, all of which can help us cope with present diff iculties. By ref lecting on the past and applying it to the present, we can create a feeling of continuity, and mend the break between our old lives and our new lives and perhaps feel less adrift in the currents of time and history, and more whole. Is it in a turtle’s power to do that? Maybe. And maybe that’s why we come to see her. Maybe that’s the key to her power: tranquility in chaos. Grace and persistence against terrible odds. Continuity. Times may be hard, the future uncertain, the comforts of the past slipping away, but maybe there are worse places to be than on the back of a turtle. When not communing with ancient sea turtles, Joe Keohane’s been spending a lot of time looking at how we humans connect with each other. Join in our first “Conversations with Yankee” webinar on December 9 to hear him talk about his new book, The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. To register, go to newengland.com/conversationsyankee.

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9/13/21 5:07 PM

Their Voices Carry Far (Continued from p. 113)

Kaylee sings her solo to Little Amal, featuring a melody she wrote. “It is easy for me to write melodies,” Kaylee says. “It just comes to me when I hear the words.”

hair stood up on the back of my neck. I knew something important was happening.” Two years later, just before Christmas, the United Nations asked Pihcintu to write their own variation on “Silent Night” (Silent night, painful night / our mothers’ tears fall in fright) and come to New York to perform it. The video of the song was featured on all the U.N.’s platforms and was seen around the world. Then in December 2018, they became the only music group to ever sing before a working session of the U.N. General Assembly. “That was quite a moment—just feeling the power of being invited into the inner chambers of the United Nations,” Fullam remembers. “They weren’t tourists; they were there to perform for the U.N. You walk into the General Assembly, and you see all the names of the

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countries. You could see the visible effect on [the girls’] faces. The U.N. means something special to a lot of them. A lot of them came from refugee camps where the U.N. had a powerful presence. This was very memorable for them.” Despite the chorus’s portfolio of performances, despite the affirmation that indeed their voices carried far, one of the most meaningful concert reviews Fullam ever received happened in a church in a small town just outside Portland. “It was packed,” he says. “We had a really great show. Afterward, the pastor came up to me. She said there were two people in her congregation who came feeling truly antiimmigrant. She said we changed them that day.” “When I’m singing to [Little Amal], I use that feeling that this is the journey I’ve been through, too.” —Brenda, age 21, grew up in a Kenyan refugee camp

ullam says there are no stars in the chorus. Everyone’s voice joins in. But if there is a signature song in their repertoire, it is “Somewhere,” written by Fullam himself. A highlight of every concert, it brings members of the audience to tears. And when the singer is the smallest child onstage, a girl named Shy, whose voice that touches depths a child should not be capable of, the other chorus members simply say “Somewhere” is “Shy’s song.” Shy is 13 now, and has been with the chorus since she was 10, when her family came from Namibia seeking asylum. It was Shy who sang “Somewhere” to the U.N. General Assembly, who sang “Somewhere” in Bar Harbor with Yo-Yo Ma’s cello a few feet away. One day I met a group of the singers at the Root Cellar, the Portland faith-based community center where they rehearse, and asked if they were jealous of Shy’s solos. “No—whoever is singing, it all comes out of one person,” replied Ruby, age 14. Midway through the Little Amal concert, Shy closes her eyes and sings of a refugee’s plaintive hope that there will be a place in the world where she can find safety, solace, a future: Can you believe what I believe? / Can you, can you wish the same as me? I look at the stage and I think of the stories I heard in that basement room at the Root Cellar, how these girls came to Maine and found what they call “our sisters” in Pihcintu. There was Prise, now 18, who spoke of being “haunted” by what she lived through for years in a Kenyan refugee camp. How she wakes with a start at the slightest noise, and how NEWENGLAND.COM

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“I know what it’s like to lose something that’s very dear to you and have no control over it,” Con Fullam says.

when she sings “Somewhere,” she cries. “It reminds me of when I was a child and thinking if only we can get out of here, we can be happy,” Prise told me. I thought of Marciline, 18, who had reached Portland from Congo in the summer of 2019 after a journey of more than 13,000 miles, mostly on foot from South America through Central America, then through Mexico. It was months of danger that she does not talk about, and it ended with her on a green cot in the Portland Expo, along with hundreds of others who had made the same trek, hearing along the way there was a place called Portland, Maine, where they would find people who cared. For Marciline, those people soon arrived— a couple who quickly grew to love her, and whom she would come to call “mother and father.” She sang in the shower, in the car, and on the way to school, where she wrestled with a new language, though she was already fluent in Portuguese, French, and Lingala. And they brought her to meet Fullam at a rehearsal, and he welcomed her by bringing over a member of the chorus who had also come from Congo, and now Marciline had found a new friend and soon was singing in a studio to make a music video with her new “sisters.” The concert ends when Little Amal bows and the screen goes dark. Her walk will continue for thousands of miles. Fullam has an interview with Univision, and then he has the return drive to make, with drop-offs in Portland, Westbrook, Gray, Lewiston. He does not reach his own home until after 8. “A good day,” he says, “but a long day for old people.” It has also been a bittersweet day. He has known Fatimah ever since she came from Iraq when she was 8 and became one of the leaders of the chorus. Now a high school senior, she has just told him this will be her final appearance. That she now feels that singing is no longer compatible with her religion. There has always been a fragile nature to the chorus. Uprooted families face hurdles, and sometimes they must move. A number of Fullam’s most experienced singers are now heading to college. Until recently, because of Covid, he was unable to bring new members in. But four more have just joined, some of whom arrived in the 2019 summer surge with Marciline. He calls it “the need to replenish.” He feels his age. “The 12-hour bus trips to Washington, D.C., take their toll,” he says. “I’m very aware I need a succession plan.” He hopes to involve a refugee from Angola who plays the guitar and comes to rehearsals, and

136 |

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Despite all the accolades Pihcintu has received, chorus founder Con Fullam says what he’s most proud of is that every one of the 300-plus singers has graduated from high school, with 80 percent going on to higher education.

whose daughter has just joined the chorus. Fullam knows he has to do more to find additional grants to keep Pihcintu on solid ground. He hopes they will find their angel, someone who sees their videos, listens to their CD, and wants to ensure they will always be heard, even as the names and faces of the singers change. Soon after the Little Amal concert, the Afghan government falls, and there is no doubt that Portland will reach out to help new refugees. Among them will be girls and young women who will feel lost, without a voice to express what they feel, bewildered by customs and a language that at first it seems they will never grasp. Maybe they will come with a social worker, or someone they meet in school. But they will find Pihcintu. They always do. “And when they walk in, we will welcome them,” Fullam says. “I consider myself immensely fortunate. I get to see these girls grow up and f lourish. Some f lounder, but they always find a way to end up on their feet. I get an emotional lift, being a little part of their lives.” To learn more about Pihcintu and to watch the group’s videos or buy their CDs, go to pihcintu.org or visit their Facebook page. NEWENGLAND.COM

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Life in the Kingdom (Continued from p. 144) book, I learned that I am a man of big ambitions but also should be watched for sagging and collapse (tall pile); that I’m unstable, lazy, and prone to drunkenness (unf inished pile, some logs lying on the ground); and finally that I should be viewed with suspicion, because some of the wood I’m claiming as my own might actually be stolen (old and new wood piled together). A woodshed might not bend every one of these character traits in a positive direction, but surely it could be seen as a sign of growth and maturity. I built the shed over the course of about three weeks, in my usual fits-andstarts style, using cedar poles for the main frame and small-diameter spruce trees as rafters. For the roof, I dipped into my pile of special 2x4s, the ones that came off the mill crooked, or with too much wane to serve as proper framing stock. I like having a pile of imperfect lumber lying around almost as much

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as I like having a pile of perfectly good lumber lying around, if only for the satisfaction of finding ways to utilize inferior materials. I screwed the 2x4s across the top sides of the spruce poles to serve as purlins for the roofing, for which I was able to repurpose a significant portion of the aforementioned rusty tin. All told, I screwed and hammered my way through maybe 10 bucks’ worth of fasteners; all other materials either came from our woods or were diverted from some less glorious fate. This did not result in the grandest structure in the history of woodsheds, but then again: 10 bucks. I’ve known folks to pay more for fancy coffee drinks. Even before the shed was fully complete, we began filling it. I’d installed vertical cedar posts at roughly 18-inch spacing along both sides of the shed; these would serve as uprights against which to stack each row. When stacked to a height that, according to Mytting, pegged me as a man of big ambitions, each row would contain approximately one cord of wood. This meant that we could fit roughly 10 cords of firewood in

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our new shed, enough for nearly two full seasons of heating and cooking. I didn’t have that much wood ready for stacking; I figured we had maybe six cords split, and another two or so in logs. No doubt if not for my instability and drunkenness, it’d all be ready to go, but alas. My vices are sundry. Over the course of many evenings stretching across many weeks, Penny and I stacked neat rows in the new woodshed, armload by armload, maybe five sticks to each armload, an incalculable number of armloads per row. Sometimes we worked in silence, other times we talked, keeping to a rhythm that allowed us to pass each other at the midpoint between shed and pile, one of us with arms full, the other with arms to be filled, the air redolent with the sweet smell of freshcut wood, which is tied for first place with freshly baled hay as the smell I love beyond all others. The boys helped too, and I was reminded that one of the greatest pleasures in my life is listening through the open kitchen window to my sons’ back-and-forth banter as they work, their conversation freed to roam by the straightforward nature of the task. Stacking wood demands relatively little of the mind while asking just enough of the body, a combination I’ve always found to be fertile ground for clear thinking and good storytelling. By the time you read this, our new woodshed will be full, or nearly so. Certainly near enough to full that we’ll be assured a winter’s worth of well-sheltered firewood, plus at least a solid down payment on the following winter’s ration, a goal that’s eluded me for more heating seasons than I can count, but which finally, finally feels so close that failure is all but incomprehensible. I wonder what Mytting would say about a fellow who, after more than a dozen consecutive years of falling woefully short, is on the verge of achieving his firewood ambitions. I’d like to think that he’d paint me as a man of resolve, a determined provider who retains his equanimity even in the face of a dream deferred. Yeah. That sounds about right to me. NEWENGLAND.COM

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Life in the Kingdom

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built a woodshed. This is very exciting to me, because for years our firewood has been covered by sheets of rusty roofing tin held in place by old truck tires and the smattering of heavy maple rounds that would not yield to the maul. There’s nothing wrong with the old tin/used tires/unyielding maple approach to sheltering firewood; many a Vermont home has been heated for decades, if not generations, with precisely the same technique. When it comes to rural thrift, it’s at least as 144 |

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proven as the repurposing of old pickup truck caps as animal shelters, and nearly as obvious as the baling-twineas-a-belt trick. Still, there are deficits. First, there’s the issue of collapse. This becomes apparent only after you’ve extracted a sufficient quantity of wood from the center of the stack, something that often coincides with accumulating snow atop the roofing tin. At this perilous point, you can either remove the snow or simply hope for the best as you continue to diminish the stack, armload by armload, keep-

ing an uneasy eye on the sagging metal. Having experimented with both techniques, I can report that I prefer a third: Send the boys out for more wood. The other deficit is purely aesthetic, because it’s pretty much inevitable that by the end of the heating season, the tin that covered the wood we’ve burned will now be stacked (or worse yet, not stacked) in our front yard. Now, no one would accuse us of keeping too neat a homestead; on any given day, you might find a shovel leaning against a tree, for no apparent reason other than it was the most logical place to lean it at the time. Or you might notice that someone has left the f loor jack at the edge of the driveway, where he recently changed a flat tire (in his defense, I’ll point out that the jack is extremely heavy, and that I, er, he will only need it again in 12 hours when I, er, he retrieves the patched tire from our mechanic). In fairness, I should note that in our family, the unflattering tendency to leave things lying about is 100 percent a male trait. For her part, Penny has always been one of those “a place for everything and everything in its place” sorts of people. But as there are three of us and only one of her, there’s really not much she can do to mitigate. So: a woodshed. One small step in the battle against homestead clutter, and one giant step in the direction of convenience. And then there’s the old adage that a woodpile is a ref lection of the person who made it. Indeed, in his book Norwegian Wood, Lars Mytting offers a handy guide to woodpile personality profiling. From Mytting’s (Continued on p. 142) NEWENGLAND.COM

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