Editor’s Note

Most years, around this time, the magazine office looks like a warehouse filled with supplies for our annual Best of NH Party, held each June for the past 19 years. For our 20th year, we’re shaking things up.

It felt a little anticlimactic when, after standing in a cold line outside Concord’s Steeplegate Mall for a half-hour and then winding around a Space-Mountain-length indoor queue for an hour, I got my shot.

In our last issue we listed 48 things that wouldn’t exist (at least not as they are) without the Granite State. Seems we missed a few, but our readers were paying attention. Here are their additions to the list.

The easiest topic for a good January 2021 Editor’s Notes would be to tell 2020, “So long, and don’t let the door hit you where the Good Lord split you.” But was 2020 really so bad we can’t say anything nice?

My mom’s mother was always “Grandmother” to my siblings and me, but to her friends she was known as Monoo. She was a world traveler, interior decorator, storyteller and collector of curiosities.

Maybe it’s the placement on the calendar between two holiday juggernauts, but there’s one annual celebration that is easy to forget, unless you are one of the millions of people for whom it was named.

“October Country ... that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.”

As a kid, my tribe was the nerds and weirdos. Truth be told, it still is. Fortunately for me, the Granite State tends to attract such people. One of our features this month makes that case and awakened a few memories.

There’s been a lot of name-calling in recent years, so it’s interesting when an epithet becomes a commendation. To be a called “nerd” was once to be sidelined, but now it’s a quirky badge of honor.

I lived in the Deep South in the early 1980s and the stone water fountains in our town park still had “White Only” chiseled into them. No one paid much notice, except to point out how slowly some things change.