yankee
A barn.
New England vintage and varietal. Red, of course. In the late 1700s, this was due to iron oxide used to protect against the other elements that rusts turning its familiar color. When paint became available, the tradition continued, and it was frugal: it happens to be one of the least expensive paint colors.
Vertical slats plumb with their neighbors. Two - no - three stories. Five windows, crossed with white panes break the main floor in half like an equator. There’s a cellar, whose entrance appears open, without a door, three of the five windows above it. Stones the foundation. To the left, a silo, topped with snow.
It is winter.
A pair of doors shut tight on the top floor. A place for storing hay, perhaps; a pulley system out on a beam allows for more efficient work. Just above an eave juts out. Another pair of doors seal off the main level from the outside. Carved in the snow a set of tire - no, wooden wheel - tracks lead away, or towards, the entrance.
To the right, a well, made of stone. A long wooden stick - no, it’s too long and sturdy to be a stick. Two long wooden pole like the masts of a ship, or rather, sailboats, lay across one another: one vertical and firmly planted, its top a wishbone; the other lays across it, pointed to the sky at an angle of fifty degrees with the frozen midground. A pail for water waits along the circumference.
Up and off in the distance to the right - east, perhaps - a church. White, with a steeple; Congregational, possibly facing the town green.
We return to the barn. Above the hay doors are four small holes. Ventilation, we assume. Snow caps the roof; a weather vane roosts above. It doesn’t move; there is no breeze. Trees bare. We count ten of them. Maples most likely.
We notice again the tracks that lead toward - or away from - the barn. Shadows from a tree - no two trees - cross the tracks which pass through an open wooden gate. A good fence - perhaps they are good neighbors, too1 - frames the wall of rocks which lines the property to the right - east - and left - west.
This is New England.
This is my brother and I, as children, looking at the painting in our family room above the blue - it was supposed to be wedge-wood, but our dad bought the wrong paint and my mom didn’t have the heart to tell him until after he was done2 - secretary desk handed down from my great grandmother to my father. This is me, right now looking at the same painting, found a few Saturdays ago at a thrift store, the fourth one we visited, in my daughter’s quest to find Cabbage Patch Kids.
I stared at this picture everyday as a child. I was obsessed with winter. Snow in particular. And this landscape, a KayDee 100% Handprint from Hope Valley, Rhode Island, is one frozen in memory.
I watched Irving Berlin’s White Christmas whenever I was home sick from school, and QVC’s Christmas in July. I had my father sing Christmas songs to get me to sleep year round, and I sang Bing Crosby’s White Christmas at my second grade concert choreographing fellow students to playact the lyrics behind me. I once painted along to Bob Ross and naturally, it was a winter scene, a log cabin, covered in snow, with a chimney showing evidence of a fireplace warming the one room hovel below. We subscribed to both SKI and SKIING magazine, and when I visit my grandmother, I would scour back issues for winter issues of Yankee Magazine.
This is New England’s magazine.
What made Yankee unique was its size: the smaller format, about the size of Reader’s Digest which my grandmother also received. With its first publication in 1935 a standard sized 9 x 12 inch magazine, WWII’s rationing forced Yankee to reduce to 6 x 9 inches, demonstrating two traits Yankees are known for: thrift and conservatism. The Yankee of my grandmother’s well-scented, shell-shape-soaped, fox-and-hound-hunting-scene-framed-wall-paintinged bathroom, and her always-clean, military-grade-made-with-ironed-sheets-twin-bedded guest rooms of the 1980s and 1990s was this size, neatly piled below the three-ply or atop the bedside table.
Physical mailboxes are meant to be filled and emptied, like the pail on the edge of the well, imbuing the owner with a sense of sustenance. When I receive the latest paper copy in my mailbox every other month, it is standard-issue size: as of 2007, Yankee re-emerged as a full-sized magazine. Taking it into my office, sitting in my rocker, thumbing through the pages, as I sit to read the only thing missing is the smell of my grandfather’s tobacco pipe. And my grandparents.
Its name references the region from which it comes. Geographically, Yankees - true Yankees - are not just those who live above the Mason-Dixon line. They aren’t even those from the northeast, despite the baseball team of the same name in the Bronx, from the Dutch Broncks, with likely claims that the term originates from the diminutive of the Dutch name, Jan (Janekke). Only New Englanders can claim this moniker in earnest.
Even as a former Connecticotian, Connecticutian, Connecticutesian, Connecticuter, Nutmegger, I am less a Yankee than my brethren to the north and have the lack of accent to prove it. Heck: Maine, whose state magazine is called Downeast, is our region’s northern most state and refers to the northern most part of its coast bordering Canada. E.B. White, the though-not-by-birth-but-by-choice-so-technically-could-never-be-a-true-Mainer, put it best:
To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.
And while the only true Yankee by birth in my family is my brother we are Yankees in spirit. A bit about that spirit. Yankees are frugal, though we’re not necessarily cheap (see: Newport, New England Liberal Arts College Tuition, Private Secondary Schools like Choate Rosemary Hall, Country Clubs). In New England, nothing goes to waste. We are conservative in every sense: we hold onto our past, we appreciate the old ways of doing things, we don’t like change, we are traditionalists, we save. While my nostalgia may not have been born into me, I grew into it - or it into me - in New England.
We are ingenious with our inventiveness. We’re industrious: we created the cotton gin (Connecticut), the snow shovel (New Hampshire), and the sewing machine (Massachusetts). We help in the kitchen: the drip coffee pot (New Hampshire) starts your morning with caffeine before you nuke your hamburger (Louis Lunch, New Haven, CT) in the microwave oven (Maine) in that Tupperware (also, New Hampshire) container. We help get you ready for, and be productive at, the office: the disposable razor makes shaving safe and easy, the ballpoint pen allows me to write a letter to a friend with the ZIP Code3 noted, while the telephone (previously) helped us make calls between building models in computer spreadsheets which continue to fill a solid part of my day: all were invented in Massachusetts. You can send your kids off to school with a lunch packed in a paper bag (Massachusetts, again) or you can prevent kids with the birth control pill (yes, also Massachusetts). You can throw a Frisbee (Bridgeport, CT) in the nation’s first park (Boston Common) or take a trip up to Vermont to fly fish in the very state where the open reel rod was created. Volleyball, basketball, and (American) football were all codified in New England. We even have our own Yankee Doodles: the first video game console (Magnavox Odyssey, 1972, New Hampshire), the first Polaroid4 film, Mr. Potato Head (and other Hasbro creations from little Rhode Island), Silly Putty and the Wiffle ball from Connecticut; and with its first dental use in White River Junction, Vermont, it should surprise no one that laughing gas is commonly sold outside Phish shows.5
A bit more about that (Christmas) spirit: while often assumed to reference prisoner exchanges during the Civil War, the gift-giving game known as Yankee Swap was first noted in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass within a list of Americana, published in 1855:
“. . the essences of American things . . . the sturdy defiance of ’76, . . . the leadership of Washington, and the formation of the Constitution – the Union always calm and impregnable – the perpetual coming of immigrants - . . . the noble character of the free American workman and workwoman – the fierceness of the people when well-roused – the ardor of their friendships – the large amativeness – the Yankee swap . . . .”
From the view of European tradesmen that all Americans were considered Yankees, we were further known for constantly seeking out a trade. As one Scottish magazine put it at the time:
“Every thing is a matter of serious calculation with your genuine Yankee. He won’t give away even his words – if another should have occasion for them. He will “swap” any thing with you; “trade” with you, for any thing; but is never the man to give anything away, so long as there is any prospect of doing better with it.”
This is perhaps another reason why I am not a genuine Yankee: I give my words away for free, and ask for (almost) nothing in return (except to share the newsletter with others if you find it worthwhile).
With mud season still a few months away, I think of Vermonter, Noah Kahan - who probably eats pie for breakfast - confessing in Homesick on his near-perfect album Stick Season, “I am mean because I grew up in New England,” and wonder whether this applies to me. Stubborn? Sure. But mean? No, I’m not a Masshole.
Yes, I yearn for the past, for simpler times. I’m long on town greens and community and short on social media and Zoom meetings. I am set in my ways - old ways - of paper and pencil. I’m a moralist bordering on Puritanical like my inherited predecessors, minus the religion which aligns with today’s New England: it is now the least religious region in the country.
And it hits me: I’m me because I grew up in New England.
While Jeff Tweedy of Wilco sings on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot:
It's become so obvious You are so oblivious to yourself You're tied in a knot But I'm not gonna get caught Calling a pot kettle black
I’m here to get caught as a pot calling the kettle black. Like New England, I have things of which I’m not proud. We gave the world Dunkin’ Donuts; I look down on others for silly reasons - like drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, light and sweet. We’re home to numerous war-related firsts - the first submarine, the first helicopter and the first revolver that fired multiple rounds without the need for reloading were all born in my home state of Connecticut, while the machine gun was invented downeast in Maine; I get angry at times.6 New Hampshire gave us a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t work (the Roomba) and the Segway, proof of Ian Malcolm’s observation that when we were busy trying to figure out whether or not we could, we never paused to think whether we should; I have trouble asking for help. Connecticut gave us Robert Moses who destroyed neighborhoods across simply because he had accumulated power and wanted to wield it; Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports, a misogynistic manchild of reputed sexual assault (accusation) fame aptly hails from Swampscott, Massachusetts; I say I was raised New England while trying to avoid the fact that I was born in/on Long Island.
Despite our ingenuity, the fall of the mill towns of northern New England - Brunswick and Lewiston, Maine; Chicopee, Holyoke and Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Dover, New Hampshire; Bethel, Vermont - and the shuttering of the textile factories of southern New England - Bridgeport, Willimantic and Waterbury, Connecticut; Central Falls, Pawtucket and Providence, Rhode Island - all preceded the Midwest’s rust belt because New England’s love of and hold on the past failed to see a way into the future; some would say my resistance to AI is obstinate with shades of myopia trending towards paranoia. The societal scourge that is Facebook was born in New England and went west like other Silicon Valley companies before it, freed from the restrictions of nostalgia and tight wallets; I think fondly and write lovingly of New England, but I left it nearly 20 years ago and can no longer consider it home.
New England is a contradiction. Emerson wrote of Self-Reliance, while living in a region known for Town Meeting governments, which still exist as a way of governing openly among the citizenry and considered the clearest example of direct democracy7 in the United States. Relying on one’s inventiveness, work ethic and personal responsibility in order to serve a larger community opened New England to the larger world - including trade routes to Asia in the 1700s - from the ports of Boston, Newport, and New London.
As Mark Twain - a former resident of Hartford, CT - said about the weather in New England, if you don’t like it, just wait five minutes, perhaps we just needed to wait. Polaroid has come back into focus albeit with its production done in the Netherlands. The mill towns of New England are now going through a revitalization after decades of dereliction and decay. Places like Keene (NH), Springfield (VT) and Biddeford (ME) are welcoming creatives - the makers, the brewers, and distillers, the artists - priced out of the northeastern cities. Even Chicago-borne Wilco hosts a biennial festival in North Adams, MA, a former mill town at the intersection of two branches of the Hoosic River.
Perhaps I, a man from - and like - New England, am capable of change. Past results would warrant current skepticism. Only time will tell. But as Ben Affleck warns about underestimating Boston - with dry, self-deprecating humor known across New England - underestimate me at your peril.
Apologies to Robert Frost.
And then never let him forget it.
What is Agawam, MA? Is the correct question to: This town, home to Six Flags, was the first to receive a ZIP Code
No, it wasn’t invented in Rochester, NY by Kodak.
Many of these inventions were pulled from New England’s Old Faithful: Yankee Magazine.
This is an understatement.
When I first wrote this word, I typed it as democrazy. Most days, this would be just as accurate.
I tend to think of myself as a New Yorker, despite growing up in the same small town at the same time as you - this is a magical reflection to read in that context. Thank you.
I’d add that something that’s inherently New England is some combination of resilience and stoicism too (our collective Irishness sneaking through).
That and our insistence on New England inventing everything despite the evidence to the contrary. See; Pizza and (bait taken) Hamburgers.