Irish Wives Tales

1.  Never ask a man going fishing where he's going.

2.  If your shirt gets wet while you're washing dishes, you will marry a drunk.

3.  If you find a horseshoe and nail it to the door, it will bring you good luck.  THe same is not true however if the shoe is bought or given as a gift.

4.  If you meet a magpie, a cat or a woman with a limp when you're on a trip, you will have bad luck.

5.  If you kill a robin redbreast, you will never have good luck.

6.  If a rooster comes to the thresh hold of your house and crows, expect visitors.

7.  If you meet a funeral party on the road, you must turn and walk with the party for at least four steps to ward off bad luck.

8.  If you trip and fall in a grave yard, you will most likely die by the end of the year.

9.  If the first lamb of the year is black, someone in the family will die within the year.

10.  It is unsafe to pick up an unbaptized child unless you make the sign of the cross.

Source:  http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/four-leaf-clover-and-other-irish-superstitions-on-st-patricks-day-118164419-237791901

http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/four-leaf-clover-and-other-irish-superstitions-on-st-patricks-day-118164419-237791901

Going and Coming: A Trip to Lake Bennington

Going and Coming, painted  by Norman Rockwell in 1947, features a family in a car on its way to Lake Bennington in Washington state.  It was published in The Saturday Evening Post on August 30, 1947.

The top picture, the Going one, shows a row boat named Skippy strapped to the roof.  A banner is attached to the side of the car announcing Lake Bennington.  The father drives with a fresh cigar in his mouth.  The mother looks straight ahead, her little girl perched on her lap.  One boy, his torso out the window, looks eager to get there.  The dog, his tongue hanging out, is squeezed between the boy and the window.  An older girl also looks out the window, a bubble gum bubble emerging from her mouth.  The other boy, in the back seat, with the same shirt on as his brother, appears to be his twin.  He is plugging his nose as if the father has just run over a skunk.  Beside him sits the grandmother, her eyes straight ahead, unmoved by her grandchildren's excitement.

The going picture tells a different story.  This time, we see the umbrella on the roof alongside the rowboat.  The father is leaning now over the steering wheel, his cigar nothing but a stub.  MOther is asleep in the passenger seat, just like the little girl.  Grandma looks exactly the same but her grandson, no longer plugging his nose, is drifting off to sleep.  His brother, in the middle seat, is still curious about passersby along with his sister, who is still blowing bubbles, and the dog, whose tongue is hanging out so much he looks overheated.  

http://wksu.org/news/images/21520/Going-Coming.jpg

E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake"

It was a family tradition.  Every August, E. B. White . author of the infamous Charlotte's Web, and his parents would pack up their automobile and head to a resort in Maine.  White looked forward to the crystal blue lake, the biting fish, the dragonflies, the serenity.  The fact that it never changed was a source of comfort to White.  Years later, White took his son to the same lake.  Now White was the adult and his son was the child.  The lake hadn't changed.  The fish were still biting.  The dragonflies still flitted about.  The only sound to break the tranquility were the outboard motors.  But despite the new technology, White was still amused by the dragonflies.  And now he could relive the experience through his son's eyes.

Here is an excerpt from Once More to the Lake, first published in 1941 in Harper's Magazine (http://genius.com/E-b-white-once-more-to-the-lake-annotated).

"We went fishing the first morning.  I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water.  It was the arrival of this fly that convince me beyond any doubt that everything was as it had always been, that the years were a mirage and there had been no years.  The small waves were the same chucking the rowboat under the chin as we fished at anchor, and the boat was the same boat, the same colour green and the ribs broken in the same places, and under the floor boards the same freshwater leavings and debris -- the dead helgramite, the wisps of moss, the rusty discarded fishhook, the dried blood from yesterday's catch."

Belgrade Lakes, Maine photo courtesy http://belgradehistoricalsociety.org/gallery/.