The Granite House

By Dale Peterson

They left a life of easy living in the desert of Arizona. They owned a 20 year old house with great air conditioning, two bathrooms, a half-dozen citrus trees and a swimming pool in a well kept upper middle class neighborhood. He was studio potter at the time and former owner of two Art Galleries. She was a Primary Grade Teacher. They had four children in the beginning.
The recession of the late 70’s and early 80’s took the galleries and many of their long time patrons and clients. They decided to try a rebirth of the business back east where the family Mother had lived and worked early in her adult life. Way, way back east and a bit north.
So we are told what happens when a young family of sun-worshippers from the wide open spaces move to the cold dense forests of the northeast and make a new life in a true piece of historic architecture. The house was cheap, the heat was expensive and day-to-day life was never-ending work. Every member of the family learns to make do with less and how to live richer lives because of it.
They had to learn to adapt and fit in with a culture totally different from what they had known. A place nearly closed off because of the climate and a rugged distance from the lower States. A place where the language was the same as the one they spoke, but could be completely different in meaning from what was spoken. A place where everyone had to rely on their neighbors, but did not necessarily feel the need to be neighborly.
They learned that when you understood -- “You can’t git there from here”-- and knew it could be completely the truth, that that you belonged. That you were truly a “New Hampshire Yankee”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dale Peterson
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301052219

Dale Peterson

Raised in a military family, Dale Clarence Peterson spent most of his childhood out of the United States. He attended British schools in Bermuda and later in Liverpool, England and a High School of just 35 students in Keflavik, Iceland. His childhood experiences encompassed much that would seem wildly exotic to the average American child.He attended college in Utah and graduate school in the hippie culture of 1970’s California. He was a war-time soldier. He became an artist, a husband and father and finally a teacher. He has been recognized with two National Teaching Awards. His art work has been exhibited and sold across the country for over 25 years. Including in the Smithsonian Gallery.Mr. Peterson has written many Educational Grants and presented many professional papers at Teachers’ Conferences and workshops. He has served as member of the National Association of Independent Schools Accreditation Committee for technology. While he began teaching Art, Dale was one of the first educators in the U.S. to embrace technology in the classroom and served as a consultant in this area for two decades.What he truly loves, by choice, is the joys of life as a husband/father/teacher. Raising six children, and teaching hundreds of others in the classroom, beginning in the back woods of New Hampshire to the sophisticated whirl-wind of Washington D.C.. With everything he writes, he speaks from hard won experience.Retiring from teaching in 2012, Dale now spends his time writing and pursuing his other passions of sea kayaking and motorcycle riding. “The Dollar-Table Hammer” is his first published book, but far from his last. He is currently at work on no less than three others. You can expect a lot more witty observations on the wonders of big family life and the nature of the artistic mind, sometimes gone amok.

Book preview

The Dollar-Table Hammer

Written and Illustrated

by Dale Clarence Peterson

Copyright 2013 Dale Clarence Peterson

Smashwords Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-4392-1375-9

ISBN-10: 1-4392-1375-5

1. Country life—New Hampshire—Humor. 2. Peterson, Dale Clarence. 3. Potters—

New Hampshire—Biography. 4. New Hampshire—Humor. 5. Family—New Hampshire—

Humor. I. Title.

GT3471.N4 P48 2009

307.72/09742 2008909124

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Kathy Osinski Peterson, without whom my life would have easily become a train-wreck and with whom my life has been quite wonderful.

Foreword:

I attended school in England during my formative years. Even at the advanced age of a grandfather, as I am now, I still seem to use certain phrases, punctuations, and spellings that were hammered into my head by my British schoolteachers. One of the distinctions of a British education is the basic grammatical variance in the written word. At the behest of my editors, I have relented on some of their corrections.

With most of those corrections I have gone with the editors' Americanized version. I am an American and have always been so.

Memory is a snapshot of an event to a person and typically exists in the present tense to that person to whom the memory belongs. The telling of memories as written stories must, by their true nature, to my thinking, occur with a twist or tang of verb tense to suit the importance of that memory to that person.

So in an effort to be true to what I believe is more my calling, that is, as a storyteller, I have intentionally bent the rules in many instances of verb tense. So, dear reader, please understand that in places my grammar choices may stray from the straight and, as I see it, narrow confines of any Writer's Guides.

I would rather tell it right, but write it wrong, than write it right and have the telling be wrong.

Table of Contents

Chapter I: Raking leaves

Chapter II: The snow rake

Chapter III: Snow; part one (spitting is not polite)

Chapter IV: Snow; part two (how to speak mechanic in New Hampshire)

Chapter V: Piled stone foundation

Chapter VI: The dollar-table hammer

Chapter VII: The beehive chimney

Chapter VIII: The mudroom

Chapter VIX: Snow fleas and chiggers

Chapter IX: The stairway in the closet

Chapter X: The bend-over hallway and the short-cook kitchen

Chapter XI: Houses without life die

Chapter XII: Beaver ponds

Chapter XIII: Yankee dogs

Chapter XIV: Bathing in the lake #1

Chapter XV: Bathing in the lake #2

Chapter XVI: The gorilla and the motorcycle guy

Chapter XVII: My four sons

Chapter XVIII: Fix-it grandpa

Chapter XIX: Do you really want to Live Free or Die?

Chapter XX: Proper potholes

Chapter XXI: Skunks at night

Chapter XXII: The biggest grocery store in the world

Chapter XXIII: Door to door

Suffix

End Notes

Raking leaves

Here in Virginia, where we live now, when the fall comes we do not have the incredible foliage as they call it in New Hampshire. Foliage refers to the tree-strewn colors coating the mountains, hills, and back roads that are so vibrant I swear your eyes hear music. The mountains in New Hampshire are just alive with it. Here in Virginia we have leaves, not foliage. Tons and tons of leaves. Most of the trees here must be some kind of oak because we also have tons and tons of acorns.

I learned a hard lesson in New Hampshire at the first rental house in which we lived. When the leaves fall, in the fall, you must rake them up.

I did not know this that first year. My thoughts were as follows:

Hey, leaves are natural, they're organic. If I just let them rot where they fall, they'll improve the soil, and the grass will be greener the next year.

The beautiful wife says, Do you really think so?

I am not some simpleton. And I for sure don't have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. These local snobs just do all that raking to impress each other! Not me! Nosiree. I don't need to impress anybody!

Right. You've never impressed me, the beautiful wife says.

I got all the way to the shed to put up the rake before her last statement hit my brain pan. Huh?....Oh, ha-ha-ha!

So I just left those leaves, about six inches of them, lying on the manicured front and back lawns of the rental. It turned out that was a mistake. You see, leaves like that do rot, as one might expect. Then the leaves flatten down into an airtight mass. And then this mat of airtight leaves drips tannic acid into the soil, tannic acid like they use to cure leather. The leaves do not melt into the sweet composted soil of my imagination.

This means that come the sweet smell of spring and the tiny budding of the first leaves, your lawn is deader than a road pizza[1] and about as attractive. My rental agreement made me responsible for the lawn care. It was a fun summer restoring that lawn. The next fall I raked.

Here in suburban Virginia, we have to keep our lawns looking good or somebody actually comes by and writes you a ticket, and you get fined. The massive old-growth Virginia oaks deliver beautiful shade all summer and, as I have said, leaves by the ton in the fall. In this day and age, at my age, I use a leaf blower. I have blown leaves as many as four times in one fall. I would fill a ten-foot by ten-foot tarp and drag it down to the curb maybe six to eight times every time I would blow the leaves. By the time the town leaf truck comes around I have a pile easily six feet high, ten feet at the base, and fifty feet long. The leaf truck comes by three times every fall in Virginia. My leaf mountain is out there each and every time.

In New Hampshire, we eventually bought and moved into a two hundred-year-old house, the one this book is about, and that house in East Pickerel Corners had an acre and a half of land. About half of it was useable yard. I did not have a leaf blower back then. I was young, with the strict principles of someone whose head is up in the billowy clouds, and I would not use one of those smelly, noisy things. I calculate that each fall I raked up, with a rake, a volume equivalent to three times what I do now. This would be like a basketball court about three feet deep in leaves.

In Virginia, the leaf truck, of which I spoke, is a huge vacuum cleaner on big tires. It sucks up your leaves and takes them away...somewhere. Like magic, they are gone. So what happens to them in rural New Hampshire, where, at that time, other than the country roads getting plowed in the winter, there were basically no city services? (There was also no city, state, or sales tax, so there is a trade-off for everything, I guess.)

In rural New Hampshire, you're on your own.

You can't burn the mountains of leaves. At least not without obtaining a Burn Permit, which is only available on alternate Tuesdays in the month of Wombat.

So what do you do with the leaves in rural New Hampshire? You bag them. What happens with the bags of leaves? This will be revealed as our stories unfold.

~

One man's trash, if it is really trash, is everybody's trash.

The snow rake

In East Pickerel Corners, New Hampshire, when you need real Yankee[2] tools, most of the time you have to make them. Even if the tiny local hardware store had had anything vaguely resembling what was needed, most would not have held up, for long, to the arduous tasks required of them.

On our acre and a half of property, in addition to the house, there was a dairy barn. In the upper loft of the old dairy barn there was the greatest collection of ancient family cast-offs I have ever seen. This could have been a treasure trove for antique dealers, collectors, and other worshippers of the past.

And it would have been if any of this collection was not just bits and pieces of the cast-offs. I don't think there was a single complete cast-off in the whole barn. The reason for this collection's existence, or, I should say, the various piles of stuff, became clear to me during that first winter in East Pickerel Corners, New Hampshire.

I needed a long and strong pole, and I found one up there. It was a really long wood pole, maybe fifteen feet long. It was straight-grained and springy. It was also kind of heavy. Perfect! Buried beneath the other sundry scraps in the barn was a pile of dented-up aluminum heat ducting. I chose a piece of this ductwork about a foot and half on the square and, oh, about two feet long. I pounded the piece, shaping it so that I could hammer it into a triangle.

I hope you are beginning to get an image.

Then I found some rusted-up old radiator clamps in a historic, or righteously banged-up, maple sugar bucket, which was really more rust than bucket. A radiator clamp is a strip of metal with notches punched horizontally along the entire length of the strip. These strips have a barrel screw that can be adjusted so that the clamp is tightened around whatever round thing you want to clamp, such as an automobile radiator hose to your automobile radiator.[3]

Next, I drilled a few holes in the aluminum duct thing and expanded the holes with a bent pruning saw into openings through which I could jam the radiator clamps. With two of these clamps, I attached my fabrication to one end of the pole. My new tool looked like a huge, long backscratcher. What it was, in fact, was a homemade snow rake. Which I used about a dozen times, or more, every single one of the fourteen winters we lived in that house in New Hampshire.

So what is a snow rake, you ask? Every homeowner in a northern climate like New Hampshire needs a snow rake because it is really hard to get a snowplow up on the roof of your house. (This is an example of a Yankee joke[4]) Snow plow on the roof! What a yawk-yawk! Especially if you own a really old house, which many of the houses in upper New England happen to be.

Snow must not be allowed to collect too deeply on the roof of an older house. Snow is much heavier than might be thought, and since many times a good, heavy New Hampshire snow is followed by a few