Happy Lucky Leather Pig New Year

Have a Happy Lucky Vintage New Year 

The only vintage New Year image I I could come up with was this faux-leather postcard. It depicts a cartoon pig jumping through a horseshoe with a four-leaf clover. Think of it as a text message from the turn of the early 20^th century. But it does remind me of a great poem by James T. Fields, my favorite Portsmuoth-born poet.

Fields (1817-1881) and his wife Annie went on to become the toast of literary Boston back when being a great writer really meant something. As a partner in the firm Ticknor and Fields (later Houghton & Mifflin), he published and befriended top British writers like Dickens, Wordsworth, DeQuincy and Thackery. In the United States he was friendly with Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Stowe, Emerson, Twain, Whittier, and just about everybody who made it big in American letters.

In his poem “The Lucky Horseshoe,” Fields wrote about a farmer who found a horseshoe and hung it over his barn door. The next year, the poor farmer’s hens stopped laying, his cattle all died, locusts and rats infested his house, and his crops withered. The destitute farmer told his sad story to a passerby who examined the horseshoe hung on the barn. “No wonder skies upon you frown,” the stranger said. “You’ve nailed the horseshoe upside down!” (Courtesy Portsmouth Athenaeum)