Travels With Becky

Talk of the towns

Town meeting season. How I love it! The moderator says: “Can you hear me in the back?”

Wise guy says: “No.”

Moderator says: “Count your blessings.”

This story came to me from an eye witness. At a town meeting in Hampton, folks complained about the high taxes they had to pay for their homes on North Beach. Selectman Ashton Norton replied: “If you live by the sea, don’t cry to me.”

Here in Northwood, the joke going around (I hope it’s a joke) is that the folks whose woods got flattened in the spring tornado were stunned to see their taxes raised. Upon inquiry, they were told: “Course your taxes went up. Now you have a view.”

Here’s a morbid but true one. In a town I won’t name, the legislative body argued for an hour about putting a traffic light on a busy corner. It would cost $4,000 annually, just for electricity.  And, as one citizen observed: “Nobody’s got killed there yet.”

Fun at the Book Swap Cafe

Yesterday Anita M. Hickey, left, and Mickey Russo, right, interviewed me, center, for their  Concord Cable TV show, Book Swap Cafe. They’ve been doing the show for four years – reviewing books and talking with local authors. They’re fun. Note the hand-painted back drop.  It’s always spring at the Book Swap Cafe!
   
Anita told about a yard sale at her home. Her husband said:  “Anita,don’t turn around.”  She froze. “Anita, stay still and don’t turn around.”  “What?” “Just don’t turn around.” Of course, she did. And there stood a big bull moose, not 10 feet behind her.
   
“He didn’t buy anything,” she said.
   
Bonus, a woman on the crew, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote a page of sayings and recollections of New Hampshire life. She handed them to me after the show. On the topic of giving directions:

“Turn left where the red barn used to be.”  This refers to an actual four-corner intersection in Contoocook. I remember that big red barn. In fact, I didn’t realize it was gone.

And:  Turn right “a quarter mile past the Flea Market before it moved around the corner.”

She also noticed lots of garbage cans with plywood on top, weighed down with a cinder block. This is red squirrel prevention.

And this winter, and last, she’s noticed snowbanks with one-foot by one-foot tunnels about four-feet high – so the mail carrier can reach in and leave the seed catalogs.

Man of the mountain

For Christmas I bought my husband, John Rule, a trip up Mount Washington. In January.  Some say I was trying to kill him, but no – he asked for it. He cashed in his chips, travel chips I mean, this week. Took a ride up the auto road on a Cat with other intrepid souls, got instructed in glacier and rock formations, bunked in the observatory, and came home pink-cheeked and full of stories. Check out www.mountwashington.org. 

John traveled to the North Country a day early, during that bad snowstorm.  (He has four-wheel-drive and went slow.)  During that storm the peak wind at the peak was 114 mph. The day he went up the temperature was a toasty -4 and winds only reached 53 mph. Some places on the road were bare. That was the good news. The bad news was nine foot drifts in other places. The ride up usually takes a couple hours. It took six hours on Thursday. 

John took some cool pictures.  Here are a few.  Maybe next time I’ll make the trip with him.  Not!

The Cat they rode in on:

       

Jefferson's Knees:

       

 A rare sighting – John Rule smiling:

Sunset at 6,288 feet, above the clouds: