And another thing

I don't see why quaint old towns like mine don't stick to quaint old names for streets and neighbourhoods. It must be the real estate people who keep sanitising things. They're the ones who name streets in developments something like "White Oak Drive" after they cut down all the white oaks to build the development.

In my quaint old town there is a street known to the natives and the cognoscenti as "Shittin' Hill." Not so long ago there was an excellent reason for this. The street runs straight up the steepest side of the steepest hill in town. When we first lived here, my landlord explained that first, anyone who used chamber pots dumped the contents into the gutters every morning. Second, most of the old houses had privies until 75 or 80 years ago, and the pits, well, leaked their contents down the path of least resistance. So Shittin' Hill really did shit. There's a yacht club at the bottom of this hill, whose cachet seems to have improved since the town mandated indoor plumbing.

We really should be on our guard to preserve bits of New England lore like this, lest people think life here always looked like a Yankee magazine calendar.