by Becky Rule
One Little Mistake and You Never Hear the End of It
At Chadbourn’s Restaurant in Northwood, Bob Chadbourn and I hosted a story swap. We each told a couple to prime the pump and then the locals were off and telling. Eating, too. Fireplace fired up, good food and stories in a warm place on a chill evening, doesn’t get much better than that. A couple of strangers strolled in, took a table by the window, ordered meals. They sat quiet for awhile, listening, until one volunteered the other to tell a story.
We just stopped in because Johnsons was full, Dave explained. That’s Johnsons Dairy Bar, up the road. But in fact he did have a story to tell about his early days as a state trooper. He had grown up in Portsmouth, but his first assignment took him to the North Country.
On one of his first patrols, Dave got onto a back road and spotted a cabin on fire, clouds of smoke billowing out the top. He radioed the alarm: I don’t know exactly where I am, but send back-up, something to that effect.
Intending to save the world, he popped the trunk of the cruiser, pulled out a massive fire extinguisher, ran through the woods, kicked in the door of the cabin, and sprayed everything in sight. When the extinguisher extinguished itself and the dust settled, he surveyed the scene:
An old guy on a bench, all white, making small coughing sounds.
The cabin wasn’t a cabin at all. It was a sap house.
A good story never gets old. A reliable source in Wolfeboro told about the fellow from away who moved to town in the 1980s. At sugaring time he noticed neighbors hanging buckets on trees up and down his road, so he went down to the hardware store, bought a couple of taps and two shiny buckets, which he hung on the biggest tree in his front yard.
He was a bit surprised that the neighbors never mentioned his sugaring effort, but instead would slow down as they passed his house, lean out their car windows and laugh. Even worse, his buckets came up empty.
To this day, I understand, town folks will ask how much sap he’s getting out of that big old oak.
