MSI Press Blog

  The fish man came to the door like clockwork every Thursday. He parked his refrigerated truck in our driveway, walked past Duke, who had come to know him, and asked Ma to come out and see what she might like that week: haddock, clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, lobster, and more. Most often, Ma would load up on haddock, scallop, and clams, leaving the lobster for our supermarket trip in the city after church on Sundays. Ma made a wicked haddock meal. She would bread a big fish with corn meal, put a little bit of milk into a fish-shaped white corning-type bowl, and bake it. Those were the days. I hanker after haddock a lot. It is almost impossible to find outside of New England, and no one makes it like Ma did. Every Sunday after church, we’d stop at the supermarket and pick up eight live lobsters. Some folks called them sea spiders (not because they did not like them but because, well, they do look like spiders, especially when they are alive). Lobster was our Sunday meal ...

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir,  In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life  by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver The Lilac Bush Across the driveway from the apple orchard and in front of the house—facing the winding rural roadway that snaked up and down the hills of Acton—stood the lilac bush. That old road wandered off in one direction toward Milton Mills, New Hampshire, and in the other toward Lebanon, Maine. In fact, the road itself divided Maine from New Hampshire as it crossed the river and passed the tanning mill. The state line was unmarked, but the family whose house straddled it knew exactly where it lay. The township boundary, they told us, was decided by the location of their master bedroom. One year, when they became fed up with Acton, they simply switched the master bedroom with another room and thereby "moved" their house to Lebanon. They have lived in Lebanon ever since. The lilac bush—lavish with purple lilacs, the state flower of Ne...

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir,  In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life  by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver The apple orchard was our front yard—if any place on a farm can rightly be called a "front yard." It was the stretch of land across the dirt driveway from the farmhouse, bordering the winding country road that separated our upper fields, corral-pasture, clothesline, house, and orchard from the lower fields, the swale, and the pine woods beyond. In one far corner of the orchard, under a stand of birch trees, alongside the road, lay the tiny, timeworn Prescott family cemetery. May they rest in peace, whoever they were. The birches partially screened the orchard from the road, adding to its at-times quiet charm and at-other-times privacy for boisterous play. The apple orchard was the hub of our lives. Besides giving us apples, pears, and even cherries—it was, in truth, a mixed orchard though we always called it "the apple orchard...