HOLLY NADLER
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This week I’ve been thinking of the Last of the Yankee Ladies on this Island — Louise Aldrich Bugbee of Oak Bluffs who wrote for this paper for over 30 years and who died in January of 2008. Now, I know what you’re thinking: There are other Yankee ladies who are still alive and putting up beach plum jam and saving rubber bands in the top right-hand drawer of their grandpa’s desk whose rolltop hasn’t worked down since the Eisenhower years.
But let’s be honest about it. Yankee role models, at least on the Vineyard, are a dying breed. The ones who even know where the wild beach plum grows — women like the late June Cronig Kappell of Teaneck, N.J., and Vineyard Haven, are no longer here to spirit us away, buckets in hand, to those secret places (often on someone’s private land) to find the low-hanging fruit. And why collect rubber bands when you can buy bags of the stupid things at Walmart?
But here’s what Louise Aldrich Bugbee had to say about saving stuff in her book of essays, Confessions of a Difficult Dame: “I know what to do with old clothing. I’ve worn it for years quite effectively and happily. I know what to do with old furniture. Keep it in the family and let time pass until some generation watches it turn from old junk any family should be ashamed to harbor into an antique everyone wants to buy.”
Inspired, right? But the part that eliminates most of us from the Yankee mentality is that few of us have the nerve to keep stuff through the “ashamed of” phase. And if we’re not going to hold onto it, we can’t just palm it off on the thrift shop. They’ll reject a three-legged sofa or anything crummy faster than the future Princess Kate will shun an off-the-rack wedding gown. What we usually end up doing is bringing the junk to the landfill where seagulls fly over and drop clam shells on it — or worse.
Another example of Louise’s Yankee grit is her modest proposal for ending the common cold: “I know of one sure cure, advocated by my sister over a half-century ago. She said that the first person in any community who showed signs of having a cold should be promptly shot.”
As you may have noticed, this never caught on in Oak Bluffs.
Neither did Louise have any patience with mood-altering medicines: “Whenever doctors gives me nerve pills, tranquilizers, anti-depression pills, I flush them down the toilet. We have an extremely well-balanced and healthy cesspool . . . There’s really nothing wrong with being depressed now and then. In fact, with all the messes and mix-ups in the world, only the idiots or the insensitive or those too self-centered to look beyond themselves and a small circle of friends can avoid some depression. It’s the only decent reaction to many situations.”
Louise herself was witnessing the demise of Yankee virtues: “Nobody digs dandelion greens anymore, or picks wild berries, or gathers nuts in the fall, or whittles toys for kids, patches sheets, gathers wild mushrooms, darns socks.”
But she did have a favorite plan for hearing the music of the spheres, and most of us are also, thankfully, adept at this practice, easily accomplished in our little town: “[During a depressed time] It took a lot of self-discipline to reach the beach and quite a bit more to relax and forget the things I should do and the people I should see. But just before I dozed off, I heard the sea and felt the sun and breathed the fresh salt air and said to myself, ‘This isn’t life time. This is a few minutes of eternity.’”
Bless you, Louise, for reminding us that we’re all Yankees at heart when we’re not frantically texting and buying new future junk, and that we live in a place where we can still find wild beach plums and mushrooms. I don’t know about whittling toys for children. They’ll just glance up from their iPods and say, “Are you kidding me?!” As for darning socks, you can get intact pairs at the thrift shop for 50 cents.
At the Oak Bluffs Public Library on Saturday, April 30 at 10:30 a.m., there will be a Mother’s Day crafts event for all ages.
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