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My handy guide to northern New Englanders — 33 Comments

1. Thanks for the recycle. I like it.

   I sold my parents house in the midwest some years ago when my father died. The selling price wasn’t terribly high for a few reasons, but one reason was that it only had a single car garage. This is where everyone actually has cars in the garages. But all the prospective buyers want at least a two car garage. Or maybe a third bay for that boat.

   Here, on central coast CA, lots of homes don’t have any garage, and most of those that do, have a single car garage used for storage or they are converted into a small living space. Or work-out or an arts/crafts space.

   Lawns? Mowing? What’s that?
   I was actually shocked that my next door neighbor started mowing her sort-of lawn recently with a hand-me-down mower from a relative. She knew how to start it and push it, but beyond that, when it wasn’t working properly, it was all a mystery to her.

2. Massachusetts isn’t really Northern New England, though the western part may have similarities to Vermont. It’s not really Southern New England either. The part about garages is very true. So’s the part about ice cream, though around here the big thing is Dunkin’s. One nearby town has three of them. It’s possible that real New England women mow the family lawn, but around here it’s Brazilians and Central Americans who do a lot of people’s mowing, and most of them aren’t women — then again, a lot of people where I am living weren’t born here and so don’t count as “real New Englanders.”

   Rhode Island may have the fewest Old Line Yankees, but somehow it keeps sending High WASPs to Washington: Pell, Chafee, Whitehouse, long after the Irish replaced them in the Bay State. It’s also quite a shock to go from semi-rural Massachusetts to Woonsocket (and if you go to Woonsocket you’re definitely up to no good), but I have a soft spot for the Rhode Island. It was a refugee for asylum seekers from Puritan Boston. Massachusetts hasn’t been a hospitable home for rebels, mavericks, spunky upstarts, and true non-conformists for some time now.

3. Connecticut? It ain’t New England. Any state that is composed half of Yankee rather than Red Sox fans is not New England.

   Hate to tell you, Neo, but there are plenty of Mets fans in CT– I know a good many. The American League is only half (and the lesser half at that, which is why it is called the Junior Circuit) of MLB; the National League, aka the Senior Circuit, is 25 years older than the AL.

   Now if you specifically want to mock the ’62 Mets, go right ahead.

4. I lived in New Hampshire for a year in 1994-95. I had gone back to school (Dartmouth) after retiring and was interested in health policy. It was an interesting year. The house I leased was pretty and on 5 acres. It had a barn in which I parked my car. The car was a Volvo, a good choice for cold winters. I had a block heater for it which attracted field mice. I stored my dog food in the barn/garage and the mice found it. They carried hundreds of pieces of kibble into the hood of my car as they enjoyed the block heater. When I returned to California, it took a year to find and remove all the dog kibble.

5. Women mow the lawns.

   Not when I was growing up there. But I did notice it here in Utah, not universal, but pretty common. Common enough that I noticed.

6. Hey, now, I’ve always mowed our lawns. My husband, intelligent man, is allergic to cut grass. Actually, I don’t mind doing it. One of my favorite moments was in a small Southern town, when I was eight months pregnant and my midsection strongly resembled a whale. I was out mowing, and a Southern gentleman stopped his car and leaned out to say, “Honey, you shouldn’t be doing that.” I replied, “But, my husband bought me a self-propelled mower!” He shook his head and drove away.

7. As an imported Vermonter (from Europe even) I can testify to many of these facts, but especially C.

   Also, Real Vermonters Don’t Ski.

8. In our little community in the mountains of NC the rule of thumb is, if your granddaddy isn’t buried here, you’re an outsider.

9. Women mowing is extremely rare in the south.

   I mow our third of an acre with a push mower. In the summer, I am soaking wet from sweat after 45 minutes. It’s a workout.

10. I am deeply shocked by Fact D. Offhand I can’t think of a time when I’ve witnessed it, not counting the female half of the couple who get paid to mow my next-door-neighbor’s yard, which usually involves her tearing around at breakneck speed on a riding mower.

    Now that I think about it, my wife may have mowed ours a few times when I was working long hours or something. Still….

    Ginger ice cream sounds great to me.

11. Neo

    Connecticut? It ain’t New England. Any state that is composed half of Yankee rather than Red Sox fans is not New England.

    However phrased, this is an issue. CT is a mixed bag. As a CT native, I would rephrase that: The part of CT that is oriented more towards NYC than Boston doesn’t appear to me to be New England.

    Regarding Yankees/Mets fans, I’d find that problematic. My NE CT hometown is definitely NE oriented. The mother of a friend of my brother was a direct descendant of one of the Hanging Judges (of Charles II). The descendants of a Revo War hero from my hometown still live in town. Not to mention that Nathan Hale of THAT family was a regional high school classmate of my sister- his sister was one of my classmates- though the Nathan namesake lived in another town. (Which brings forth Faulkner’s phrase about the past not being dead yet.) But there are a fair number of Yankees – not to mention Mets- fans in town, even though they are in the minority.

    As my brother and his wife have lived in Maine for nearly 20 years, I have some connection with Northern New England. From my southern NE childhood, Bert & I, from Maine, stirs up memories. Here’s one of them.Bert & I_Down East Socialism.

    And Robert Frost. His descriptions of wet, dreary November are so evocative.

12. Garages: right, but you forgot one thing. The garage door should be (a) broken, (b) jammed partly open, (c) at an angle so passers-by can wonder at how much crap you’ve got crammed in there.

    Ice cream: and soft serve. With jimmies. Every farm stand in my part of western Massachusetts–and there are a lot of them–sells it. By the way, Russians–another cold-weather people–are also crazy about ice cream. Go figure.

    New Englanders also love fried clams.

    Women mowing the lawns: a legacy of generations of Polish, Finnish, and French Canadian farm women. At least around here.

    Real Vermonters don’t ski and real Mainers don’t swim. Given the temperature of the ocean in Maine, not surprising. Quarries are OK, however.

    Other stuff:

    Rural New Englanders don’t paint their houses. Or maybe they painted the house fifty years ago, but then they let it go. I suspect this is because the climate is going to render any paint job nugatory in a few years, so why bother.

    Related: every self-respecting New England hill farm has a cluster of dilapidated wooden work sheds and out-buildings, garnished with rusting farm implements and dead tractors.

    I’ve been visiting my hometown in western Mass. this past week (my brother still lives here) and have been driving around a lot in the hills. New England is basically Appalachia, but with a heavy overlay of New Yorkers. And stupider politics. And unpredictable weather. Yesterday: 92 degrees. Today, after violent thunderstorms last night: 56 degrees.

    Miguel Cervantes: Charles McCarry was born in Pittsfield and grew up (IIRC) in a small hill town in the Berkshires. He graduated from Dalton High School. Dalton is home to the Crane Paper Company, sole producer of the paper for U.S. federal reserve notes (dollars).

13. This is the type of post that I live for.

    Thank you Neo for explaining how people live in the far NE corner of our country.

    Erronius

14. Fact D: Women mow the lawns.
    If women in northern NE mow the lawns, I suspect it’s for smaller sized lawns. It took me five hours to mow the lawn of my childhood southern NE home. (I was very happy to get $2 for both the front and back.) For years I mowed the lawn of a neighbor, which took nearly the same amount of time. I’d imagine that not many women, even in northern NE, are going to mow lawns of that size.

    Fact E: New Englanders love ice cream.
    Yup. One Christmas I gave my cousin a half gallon of butter pecan ice cream, with a “treasure map” that would enable her to locate the ice cream present in our freezer.

    Blue Bell is a very much loved ice cream brand here in TX. But I’d say that the local NE ice cream brand I grew up on- which manufactured the butter pecan ice cream I gave to my cousin- was as good as Blue Bell, if not better.

    Hubert, interesting that factoid about Charles McCarry.

15. Well, this does make New England sound like a somewhat different place, to be sure. I like to hear about these kinds of things.

16. I’ve never seen a woman mowing the lawn except one of my next door neighbors who are a retired lesbian couple.

    Ice cream! I think Ben and Jerry’s got started in our town. You can get a cone, cup, or quart of ice cream anytime, even the day after a blizzard, though ginger ice cream is something that you can only get at the Japanese restaurant.

    When we moved into our house we had a charming one car garage that was literally up on stilts. I used the attached tool shed but parking the car was a bit tricky since it was the right width for a Model T. It was only used when a snow storm was coming so one car didn’t have to be shoveled out. It also served as an animal shelter where the raccoons and skunks would fight it out underneath the floor in the middle of the night, another good reason not to park in there. Fumigating the car wasn’t an exciting job.

17. It takes my wife 3 hours to do our yard on her zero turn mower. I follow around on foot picking up the dog toys as she points them out and using the line trimmer on the places she can’t get to. Also I move things like kayak stands so she mow under them and then put them back.

18. @ Hubert > “Rural New Englanders don’t paint their houses. Or maybe they painted the house fifty years ago, but then they let it go. I suspect this is because the climate is going to render any paint job nugatory in a few years, so why bother.”

    John Grisham has a semi-biographical non-lawyer, non-detective book on the subject.
    https://www.jgrisham.com/Books/a-painted-house/

    The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a “good crop.”

    Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that’s never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.

    For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.

    A Painted House is a moving story of one boy’s journey from innocence to experience.

    Part of the journey is painting the unpainted farmhouse, and why it was done.

    Coincidentally, I was born today (June 3) in 1952, but not in Arkansas; I suspect rural Texas was not a lot different. I don’t remember knowing anyone with an unpainted house, but I suspect they existed in certain parts of town, and out on the farms.

19. Hilarious moment when the next door neighbor’s 5 year old daughter once told us; ‘This morning dad told mom ‘If that lawn’s not mowed by the time I get home, you’re outta here!’
    Mom a petite 5’1″ and dad a 6’4″ big wave surfer.

20. }}} Fact C: If you weren’t born here, forget about it.

    It’s not that people won’t be cordial. But you’ll always be somewhat of a stranger.

    Isn’t this true of many areas, Neo? It’s certainly true of the South, particularly the Rural South — if you weren’t born within 50mi, you’re a weirdo.

21. }}} Blue Bell is a very much loved ice cream brand here in TX.

    Gringo, Blue Bell is just about the best Ice Cream Brand, period. They are available at least across the South, into Florida.

    Not tastewise — they CAN be beaten, though not for anywhere near the same price — Though they are as good as anything else selling for vaguely the same price per similar-sized container…

    As a company, they are awesome.

    1 — they are still an actual half gallon. SO many @%$#$^#$ ice cream companies are cheating customers these days by shrinking the size of the container. I think Breyers, who, AFAIK, started this crap with ice cream, is down to 1.5 liters, which is WAY under a half gallon**.

    2 — a couple years ago they had some serious issue with bacteria. They acked it, sent out a recall, and shut the place down for six months while they cleaned the plant top to bottom, to make sure they were safe.
    A — that HAD to hurt, financially. I was afraid they might not open back up.
    B — I’m not sure many companies would actually do that, they’d do as little as they were required to do by liability insurance.

    I think very very highly of the company and its management. I’m glad they survived. Blue Bell is one of the few ice cream brands I’ll buy.

    ====
    ** Note: I grant, this practice started long ago — I first noted Frito Lay did it with potato chip containers in the late 70s when I had a summer job at the local production facility doing QA. But it wasn’t done with most other things until the last couple decades. Nowadays most ice cream makers do it, many orange juice bottlers do it, many of the “milk alternatives” do it. These were all things that used to be sold in a standard size — usually half gallons, quarts, etc. Now the bastards all #%#$^ cheat customers.

22. These were all things that used to be sold in a standard size — usually half gallons, quarts, etc. Now the bastards all #%#$^ cheat customers.

    Ask me about the shrinking bags of dry cat food (the same is true for dry dog food and bird seed). In regard to the canned stuff, the cans are the same size but the price goes up every few months. Fancy Feast was 25 cents per can when I adopted my first kitty in late 2000; it’s now $1.09 per can for most flavors. I used to think that stories of elderly people shoplifting cans of cat food because they could no longer afford tuna packaged for human consumption were fiction; now, I suspect there may be some truth in those accounts.

23. AesopFan: Happy Birthday! You’re exactly one day older than one of my Boston cousins.

    Thanks for the Grisham tip. I’ll look it up.

    Good to see you, but: weren’t you supposed to be on break for the summer in Wyoming?

24. As a lifelong New England resident, originally eastern MA and now Maine, this is an excellent list. Though I have to say the one about women mowing lawns is not universally true in my experience. I know a few who have mown the lawn, but they did not do so regularly. The one about garages is especially true. My parents had never put the car in the garage, it was more like an oversized shed with yard and lawn equipment, kid toys, and so forth. Because of this when we purchased our first home that had a garage, I insisted that we kept our cars in it. We have done so ever since.

25. New Englanders don’t use umbrellas.

    That fact reminds me of when I started college in DC – I found it funny that so many people there use an umbrella when it snows!

    Women mow the lawns

    Here in the New Jersey suburbs I think about half the lawns in my neighborhood are cut by women. One of my neighbors, an elderly retired guy, uses a “lawn service” which is really a widow in her 50s who cuts grass to supplement her income.

    And as for Ben & Jerry’s – nope, I can do without. Their ice cream is too much like candy with all the bits they add. Also for all the virtue signalling that company does they are the cheapest people around. Went on their tour one trip to New England and found the “samples” at the end of the tour so skimpy as to be embarrassing – two little pill cups (you know, the little white cups that they put pills in at the hospital) with what ever flavor they were making at the time. Although you could buy any flavor they make for sale (at rather high prices) at their ice cream shop.

    I guess you could make an argument that their small samples were an indication of New England “frugality”? Na, forget that idea; Ben & Jerry’s is just liberal cheap!

26. Neo, Thanks for the memories. Having been ‘Made in Maine’ long ago I recall when Sugarloaf was just another mountain down the road. Some live cams if interested:
    https://www.webcamtaxi.com/en/search.html?searchword=MAINE&searchphrase=all

27. PS: Meant to mention… I also recall when Flagstaff was my hometown… not a lake.

    “Below” by Slaid Cleaves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ATIVa7WbHs

28. Classic New England was the small towns with wooden buildings that all look like they could use a fresh coat of whitewash. In recent decades, money from tech, finance, tourism, or trust fund babies has gotten the towns in any proximity to big cities or tourist centers painted, but it may be different in out of the way places up north.

    My parents’ garage was for stuff, but some of the stuff was the old, broken down cars that my father was always planning to fix up and put back on the road, so in a way, we did indeed have a “two car garage.” In another part of the country, we would have been able to keep those cars on the lawn, but one couldn’t get away with that in suburban New England.

    If you don’t keep your (working) car(s) in the garage, you have to shovel them off when it snows. Snow shovels can damage the finish. For that reason a special plastic car shovel was invented, but it was usually buried somewhere underneath all the other stuff in the garage, so we probably damaged the paint job anyway.

    The neighbors did keep their cars in their garages, They also hired people to shovel their driveways and mow their lawns, but they were usually people “from away.” A real new arrival is somebody who keeps their car in the garage and under a protective car cover.

29. Born in MA, grew up in MI. Went back with the folks to see both sides of the family, MA and CT. Every summer through age maybe eighteen.
    Figured New England Barn Red was an actual paint color you could order–everybody else seemed to.
    And tall houses painted white with dark green shutters were a zoning requirement or something.

    As I recall, going on sixty-five years ago, Friendlys was an ice cream place. Now a restaurant. Used to save up my allowance for the Awful Awful, forty cents, or the huge hot fudge sundaes, thirty five cents.

    My father and his brothers would load up on clams and lobsters. My mom’s family was in MA from southern Ohio, so our usual diet growing up didn’t include molluscs or arthropods.

    Loved the landscape, hills and valleys and old stone walls.

    Other than a problem with some vowels (“log” was “lahg” and so forth) and terminal “r”, never noticed a local personality type.

    Highly recommend “Sudden Sea” by Scotti, a very well researched and very well written book with more than the usual meteorology about the Long Island Express (hurricane of 38). I was caught by book, having been in or heard of most of the places from my father’s stories of growing up in Norwich, CT.

30. OBH, you make Blue Bell sound very appealing. Looking on their ‘where to buy’ map, I see their reach extends theoretically way up into a few counties in northern IN and northwest OH, just shy of southern MI, but maybe close enough that I could have a reason to hunt for it when I’m over that way.

31. @ Hubert > “Good to see you, but: weren’t you supposed to be on break for the summer in Wyoming?”

    We are, but I had some (relatively) spare time and dropped in to see what was going on here. We keep pretty busy, especially now that school is out and the vacationers are on the road.

32. Re: Ice cream / New England

    That was about the first thing I noticed (after the fall colors) when I moved to Boston. As I recall then, Massachusetts had the highest per capita consumption of ice cream in the country. I remember “Friendly’s” — a family restaurant / ice cream parlor — being everywhere.

    I was shocked last time I was in Boston to discover all the “Bailey’s” were gone. Their signature dessert was a hot fudge sundae served in a pewter dish and plate with a bit of the fudge slopped ostentatiously onto the plate.

    https://caughtinsouthie.com/features/remembering-baileys-ice-cream-shop/

33. Went to Prince Edward Isle 4 years ago. Stopped in Maine to visit wife’s high school chum. Very liberal, but polite use to be old money ,now just old. Live in grandpappy the sea captains house built on a big rock right on the bay/ocean. It creaks when the wind blows , made us a traditional main seafood feast. The mussels weren’t bad, and the best lobster we ever had. Traveled north through rural Main and met a few characters . Though a Mississippi Redneck I met some positively shonuff country boys . As we say “he was as country as turnip greens.” I fit right in. Can’t wait to visit again. Should have skipped Canada and stayed in Main

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