Columnist Susan Wozniak: Propaganda is the crack a nation might step on
SUSAN WOZNIAK
Published: 6/28/2021 7:09:02 PM
Does folklore still matter? Is there an oral culture? In the era of social media allowing instant conversations across the world, the question might seem absurd. Unless, that is, while you’re taking your 4-year-old granddaughter for a walk, she says to you, “Gwanma, do you know if you step on a cwack, you get dead?”
I laughed but only in my mind because when I was in elementary school, kids chanted, “If you step on a crack, you break your mother’s back. If you step on a line, you break the devil’s spine.” That’s folklore, as are the games children might play at recess, like Red Rover, or the chants girls recite while jumping rope.
Nancy Robart, Kennebunk: Sweet summer days spent capturing the perfect raspberries
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When I was a young girl, I looked forward to the August weeks when I visited my great-aunts’ and great-uncle’s raspberry farm in Cambridge, New York.
Her great-aunts’ and great-uncle’s upstate New York raspberry farm, which Nancy Robart visited every August to help them pick, was a world of its own.
Gigi Janko/Shutterstock.com
Nancy Robart lives in Kennebunk with her husband and yellow Lab, Bodie.
When our white Valiant crossed the bridge with the eagle on it, and turned down their dirt road, named after them, anticipation would rise. At the end of 4 Ford Ave. beamed a yellow farmhouse with two porches: the front porch, filled with rockers, and the side porch, on which we would later sit and ready our berries in their paper containers.