“Lemonade...

...made in the shade, stirred with a rusty spade by an old maid.“

Somebody asked me about that rhyme today, how I remembered it, and that's how. A web search yields references from the history of Marion County, Arkansas, and from Mountain Laurel, Virginia, with minor variations. Tennessee Williams, in Glass Menagerie, rendered it, ”Lemonade, lemonade Made in the shade and stirred with a spade Good enough for any old maid.“

My dad always liked to add, ”tickles your tonsils and takes your tongue for a sleigh ride.“

But, what I started out to say here, in the process of checking out the lemonade ditty I stumbled on this nifty page from the ever-nifty Library of Congress describing the WPA's ”America Eats“ project from the 1930s. It's definitely worth a look. Some of the best American writers and photographers of the 20th Century got their start with the Federal Writers' Project and you can find a whole lot of what they did on the museum's excellent web site.