This photo was taken in northern New Hampshire, where beauty abounds!
In New Hampshire … we are a proud and independent people. We do not take to being bossed around. We like to think our own thoughts. We like having the first in the nation primary election. We dislike people with money moving here from Massachusetts and elsewhere. Please visit and vacation, leave your travel dollars, and then, please go home!
We don’t like what Nashua has been turning into – namely, a suburb of Boston, and a haven for street gangs and crime (in parts of the city). We don’t like the violence on the streets of Manchester, including a police officer being shot down in the line of duty, within recent memory. We don’t like all the trees being cut down to allow for building housing, and we don’t like the high end, $400,000.00 condos like the ones that are plunked in what used to be a field to graze cows on, nearby. We don’t like our favorite restaurant going out of business so that yet another pharmacy could be built in its place.
In New Hampshire, we enjoy the sound of our own Yankee accent, and in fact, we like
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BEING
Yankees, with a mind of our own. We don’t cotton much to strangers, ’round these parts. We are insular. You are not a true Yankee until your family has lived here for many generations and is familiar with the word, “A-yup!”
In New Hampshire, we like our victuals – those hearty beef stews, those lobster feeds, and those barbecued ribs. We are suspicious of doctors, some of us with good reason. Our state university started out as a “cow college” for people to study agriculture (as one of my brothers did). Many of our old timers think that someone with an advanced degree is an “educated fool,” although, that is not the most current trend of thinking, probably due to the “newcomers’” arrival.
We like the seacoast with its Isles of Shoals, a perennial hangout for artists and poets in the nineteenth century. We keep the memory of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a geological formation of rocks that resembled an old man in profile, until it fell. We enjoy the lakes and streams, and go smelt fishing on Great Bay in Portsmouth, a tricky situation with incoming and outgoing sea tides – but boy, are the smelts good!
If you don’t live in New Hampshire, eat your hearts out. If you do live here, then celebrate! Begin by celebrating our own: President Franklin Pierce, Sarah Josepha Hale, Robert Frost, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Hans Reyes, (the creator of Curious George), Grace Metallious, J.D. Salinger, Joyce Maynard, Alan Shepard, Christa McAuliffe, Celia Thaxter, Faye Labanaris, Ellen Peters, Carol Doak, Gerald Roy (a recent transplant), the Shaw’s Brothers, Tommy Makem, Bill Staines, Daniel Webster, and Ellen Emeline Hardy Webster, as well as a host of others who made themselves known to the public by their contributions to creativity, music, quilt history, quilt teaching, quilt travel trips, space travel, or the written word.
The scenery of New Hampshire is so inspiring, as are the birds and wildlife, the change of seasons, the covered bridges, and the old men, whose favorite saying is, “Ain’t from ’round here, are ya?”
Please visit us in any season. We will be happy to welcome you to our ski lodges, our lakeside cabins, and our fine restaurants. If you are a quilter, there are lots of quilt shops in the state, including Keepsake Quilting. The Machine Quilters Expo is set up in April at the Center of New Hampshire on Elm St., in Manchester; and the International Quilt Festival, by the Mancuso Brothers, visits the state, at the same venue, once per year. We are quilters, and there are lots of little quilt shows and some larger local guild shows. Quilting is alive in New Hampshire, the “live free or die” state.
Where the Purple Lilacs Grow song
Patricia Cummings, quilter and quilt historian
Quilter’s Muse Publications
