by Becky Rule

At a storytelling session in Wilmot, a local told how Clinton Williams once helped him locate the corners of a wood lot in Grafton near Isinglass Mountain. This was midwinter, but Clinton knew where the pins were and, though the snow was deep, the new owner got the picture as they walked the bounds.

On the way out, they men cut across a big field. Up sprung a wicked snow squall that smacked their faces and knocked them off kilter. By gorry, Clinton Williams said, that was a regular Dorchester thaw!

I’m guessing Clinton was referring to how cold it got in the nearby town of Dorchester (pronounced Dawchester), so cold that a wicked snow squall would seem like a spring breeze. No question some towns draw the cold. Something to do with the arrangement of our New Hampshire hills.

Another expression that takes a bit of figuring is leaning toward Sawyers, which I’ve been told refers to property of a family called Sawyer. Evidently, a lot of Sawyers settled in in New Hampshire, because several towns I’ve visited claim the saying as their own. The leaning implies decrepit, on the verge of collapse, as in: That barn with the sagging roof won’t last the winter; it’s leaning toward Sawyers.

However, B.A. Botkin in A Treasury of New England Folklore says the expression refers to a person leaving the house surreptitiously or as though going for a drink when he should not. Seems a family named Sawyer ran a store which sold alcohol years ago in Sugar Hill. Sneaking out for a drink, or a few drinks, could cause the drinker to collapse, I guess.

Then I called my friend Art, an authority on New Hampshire history and asked for his interpretation. He said with confidence that the expression referred to felling trees. The sawyer notched the tree so it would fall a certain way. If it leaned the other way, i.e., in the sawyer’s direction, that was bad. Could be catastrophic. For the sawyer. Come to think of it, didn’t do the tree much good either.

I still don’t know exactly what that old saying means, but imagine by the time that Dorchester thaw got through with Clinton Williams, he felt like he was leaning toward Sawyers. Or sawyers. Maybe he felt like he’d been through the mill and squirted down the sluiceway.