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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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!