Dorothy Amero Cummings

MY VANCEBORO LIFE

I was born in McAdam, New Brunswick in Mrs. Dixon’s maternity home on what was then called Horney Corner. I arrived before the doctor did and my mom always said that it was the only time in my life that I was ever in a hurry. I can’t imagine how a woman gives birth to at 10 1/2 lb. baby without the aid of a doctor. I have an older sister named Eileen who was two at the time. My father went for a walk before I was old enough to remember him and never came back. 

My first real memory is of my 3rd birthday. Mom had bought me a beautiful white eyelet lace dress and I was wearing it for my birthday. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee when my Uncle Lawrence and his cousin Preston Knowlton came in the front door. Lawrence had bought me a big frog squeak toy for my birthday and instead of giving it to me he peeked around the corner of the door casing and squeaked it at me. I spilled coffee all down the front of my new dress. I was not happy. That frog went flying across the front room floor from the toe of my shoe and I don’t remember ever seeing it again.

We lived between Dudley’s store (now Holly’s) and the Little’s. One day Eileen, Charlene Little and I were playing and they were pushing me around in my baby carriage. Somehow they got it in their mind that it would be funny to push me off the end of the porch. Bless their hearts, I was not happy.

Then there was the time while we were still living there that Mom decided it was time I learned to go to the outhouse by myself. We shared an outhouse with the Little’s. It was almost dark on the evening that I remember so well. Mom sent me out and I didn’t dare to walk that far at dusk by myself so I crawled under the back porch and squatted. Unfortunately for me and my bottom I didn’t see the broken coffee pot that was there and I sat on it. Cut my bum pretty bad. I stood up fast and stuck a nail that was in the porch in my head. Hurting at both ends, I was not happy. From then on I went to the toilet.

We couldn’t wait to get a penny or two so we could go over to the store and buy candy. Fireballs, licorice pipes or babies, chocolate babies, root beer barrels and so much more. Best of all where I was concerned were the little packets of colored sugar that you’d lick your finger — stick it in and lick the sugar off. Makes me gag thinking about it now but sure tasted good at the time.

Birthday #4, not happy about the cake. Looked good but it had chocolate jimmies on it and I didn’t like them. Oh well, at least Mom made me a cake. Thanks Mom. This was the year that Eileen started school. Mom got Albert Christensen to take her to school on her first day. I was jealous for more than one reason. Later that year we moved up to Uncle Lawrence’s house, which was on the top of Shaw’s hill, on the right going up. You look at that space now and you’d wonder how houses stood perched on that small piece of land but they did, two of them. Ours and Bob Price’s. His house was directly across from Mrs. Scribner’s and ours was directly up the hill looking down over Gladys Brother’s. Eileen and I loved that house. It had an upstairs and a banister. We didn’t use the upstairs. Eileen says a tree had fallen and come down through the roof but I don’t remember that. I do remember that the upstairs windows were boarded up and that the birds would get in between the boards and the windows and build nests. We would go up and try to feed the little birds things like green apples.

This house had a big stone porch and wrap around veranda. Must have been quite a house in its heyday. Beside and below the house was a field that we used to cut across to go to Grammy’s house on Water Street. This field was chuck full of blackberry bushes. YUM. 

We burned wood, as most people did and never had a very good fire because Mom couldn’t afford to buy wood. It was always cold in the winter but we all slept together in Mom’s bed so we didn’t freeze. I remember one evening Eileen and I were sitting in the kitchen with our feet in the oven (all the way to our hips) trying to stay warm and Mom was out back cutting some trees down with a dull axe so we could continue to have a fire. She always did this after dark, probably for several reasons but the big reason was so that she could wear pants under her dress. Most women didn’t wear pants/slacks in those days and certainly not my Mom.

But I digress. While she was out there she looked up and saw that we had a chimney fire. Imagine how she must have felt with us girls inside alone. She came in and grabbed us and got us out. One of the high school boys was walking by. He came in and got the salt canister, climbed onto the roof and dumped it down the chimney putting the fire out. Very cold the rest of that night, that’s for sure. I wish I could remember who he was but I can’t.

One year Mom did manage to buy a cord of wood and it was dumped, not yet piled, on the veranda. Mom, who did all of her laundry by hand, had taken the wash tubs out on the veranda to take them down back and dump them. She started across the veranda with me close on her heels — Eileen was at school — and the brace that held the veranda up let go. Down went the entire veranda, mama, me, wood and wash water all together. I was stuck under the wood and I remember somebody saying, “If Amy hadn’t had that wood there that little girl would be dead.” I guess the wood kept the weight of the veranda off me. Mom ended up still on top of the veranda but I’m sure with many scrapes and bruises. The worst thing for me was that I had my little blue truck in my hand and we never did find it.

Although our father chose to leave us early, his sisters, my Aunt Susie and Aunt Leone, were always there for us, as was Grampy Amero. Grampy used to go down to the railroad after dark and ‘find’ coal for Mum to burn. Otherwise we might have frozen. I remember him taking us for a ride in our sled. Eileen and I were covered up with a blanket. Eileen reminded me that when we were coming back home she was walking and I was on top of the blanket because the box of the sled was filled with coal. We visited with our aunts regularly and Aunt Leone used to give us Toni home perms, much to our displeasure. We didn’t know how to take care of curly hair and neither did Mum, so after the first day it was nothing but frizz. Uncle Lot, Susie’s husband used to threaten us with his yardstick but we knew he would never use it. He also used to tell us that we were full of kiddley water. Uncle Lot was very sick most of the time with asthma but still went to work on the railroad every day or night.

I loved going to Aunt Leone’s and sitting on the front porch. Her house seemed to be especially attractive to lightning. She wouldn’t let anybody go near the sink when there was a thunder shower because she said that the lightning would come in through the pipes. One day when we were there a ball of lightning came in through the screen door, crossed the kitchen and went out through the screen in the window. Left great big burn spots on the screens. She and Susie together also taught us to knit, something that both Eileen and I enjoy today. My cousin Lew had an erector set and he had built something big and elaborate — I think it was the Eiffel Tower –but I don’t remember for sure. I do remember that Aunt Leone was very careful that we not touch it because he had put so much work into it. I also liked to bang on her piano but usually wasn’t allowed to because her husband Mike would be sleeping. He worked nights.

One time when we were really small we were over to Aunt Susie’s and our father was there. He took us down to the gas station and bought us each 5 cents worth of candy. We didn’t understand then why mom got upset about that but now realize that it must have been hard for her, seeing us get all excited over penny candy when he never paid any child support. I didn’t see him again until I was fifteen and met him in a bar in Bangor. He thought I was Eileen.

In 1953 we were living in Lawrence’s house up on the hill when we got the news that Grampy Crocker had died. I didn’t know then that he had ended his own life. We immediately went down to Grammy’s house and she was sitting on the couch with Uncle Roy McLaughlin, his arm around her, and she was crying. I remember thinking that she sounded like a kitten. Remember, I was just a little girl. It was almost Eileen’s birthday, so when we went back home Mum gave us our birthday presents early. She had sold a punch card to get a doll for Eileen and Uncle Lawrence had won the other one, so gave it to Mum so that we could each have a doll. 

Grampy was laid out at the house and his casket took up almost all of the front room. The adults were standing around in the kitchen arguing about whether or not I was old enough to go in and see him. I was a month away from turning 5. Finally, my Aunt Gracie Crocker took the bull by the horns and took me in to see him. I’m glad she did, I’m not sure it would have been real to me otherwise. Grampy was buried on Eileen’s birthday. I only have a few memories of Grampy, but one is of sitting on his lap and asking him why he didn’t have any fingers. He had had a couple of his fingers cut off half way at one of the sawmills where he had worked.

We usually celebrated our birthdays on Eileen’s birthday since they were only a month apart, but that year we celebrated on my birthday. I was so happy. Mum didn’t make us a cake, she made cupcakes and she spelled out Happy Birthday with sprinkles on top of them. She let me have the one with the D on it. That made my day. Brenda Monk came to our party and she brought me a little red handbag with metal studs on the side. Then she was upset when her mother came to get her and she couldn’t take the purse home with her. She was a year younger than me so I guess she hadn’t yet grasped the concept of giving gifts.

I’m not sure how long after that we moved in with Grammy. I’m sure she needed Mum there. Grammy could still get around a bit but not much. I don’t think she ever went upstairs in her house after Grampy died. She had rheumatoid arthritis and just shuffled along because she couldn’t lift her feet off the floor. Her knees and feet both looked like bowling balls and her hands were all bent out of shape. Grammy loved flowers and grew lots of them. Her favorite was her big American Beauty rose bush that grew on the corner of her property. She also had pink and yellow roses. bachelor buttons, poppies, ribbon grass, irises and I don’t remember what else. She didn’t pass her green thumb down to me.

That summer that we lived with Gram, Mum took us up to the boat landing to swim. It was a wicked hot day. Mum didn’t swim with us, but I can remember what she was wearing: a red crepe dress and white sandals. While we were there Mum was sitting on the sand watching us. The boat landing was crowded that day. Larry and Terry O’Brien were also there playing in the water and mom noticed that Terry was just floating on his belly and not moving. She hollered and hollered trying to get Fay’s attention. Fay was sitting with a bunch of women up by the boathouse. She couldn’t seem to alert her so she ran into the water and grabbed Terry out and obviously saved his life. It was so hot that on the way home her dress started to shrink and also run. By the time we got to Grammy’s, the skirt was quite short and the red from her dress had run all down her legs and onto her white shoes. But she had saved a life. She was happy. I saw Terry last year for the first time in our adult life. I asked him if he remembered that. He said no, but he was glad that she did it.

That Christmas, while we were still living with Grammy, Mom didn’t get up in the morning. Eileen and I kept running up and down the stairs to show her what Santa Claus brought us. Every time she would say “Ask your grandmother what time it is.” After a little while Chrissie Beers came and took Mum somewhere. We didn’t know where but it was okay because she was with Chrissie so we weren’t worried. A couple of days later Chrissie brought her home with our best Christmas present, a little brother named Brian. We were happy!

I hung around a lot with Brenda Monk. We always called ourselves cousins with no idea that we really are, although distant. Brenda was fun. She never followed the rules and that was half the fun. Do you remember shadow shows? We used to do those in Brenda’s cellar because it was the only place dark enough. We’d hang up a sheet with a light behind it. The audience would sit on the mud floor in front of the sheet and the actors would be behind so that all you could see was their shadows. Usually, the show was an operation of some kind. I inhaled my first cigarette in that cellar. Lucky Strike with no filter. I was shaky and sick all day. I thank God that I never liked it.

Brenda’s parents owned a small store and Alice, Brenda’s mother, always called Brenda “little lady.” I remember many times standing in the back room of the store while Alice put Brenda’s hair in finger curls with that green hair goo that we used to use before the days of Dippity Doo. Brenda hated the finger curls. She said they made her look like a baby. After the hair was done, while Alice was still in the back room Brenda would steal a pack of cigarettes and off we’d go.

Clarence and Alice Monk worked hard. Clarence worked on the railroad as well as in the store. Alice kept a spotless house and also worked in the store. She made Italian sandwiches to sell in the store. They were made in hot dog rolls and sold for 25 cents. They were delicious. Alice would bring the clothes in off the clothesline and sprinkle them with water, wrap them in plastic and put them in the fridge to be ironed later when she had time. 

On a rare day off they would go down river to their camp and since Brenda was the only girl, sometimes they would take me with them. I loved that place, we would fish with the bamboo fishing poles, go swimming in the river among the eel grass, pick bunch berries or tea berries and just generally have a good time. 

We would go often to visit Brenda’s Grammy Howland, who was actually her great grandmother. I didn’t know that at the time but it doesn’t matter; she was just Grammy Howland. I liked going there. She was a really nice lady and a couple of times when we arrived about supper time we found her on her knees in her pantry saying her prayers. That left an impression on me.

One evening about dusk or a little after dark, we hid in an old cellar off Water Street. We waited for Duffy Getchell, who was married to Brenda’s grandmother, to walk home from work on the railroad. When he walked by we hollered “Hoot, hoot Duffy.” He probably knew who it was but we didn’t stick around to find out. We ran like lightening up the back track. From that day on we always referred to him as hoot hoot Duffy.

Billy and Brenda had hula hoops that their father had made for them out of PVC pipe. They were really heavy. We spent hours twirling them. To this day I can’t twirl one of those wimpy lightweight things. 

I would go to Brenda’s house to spend the night; it became a kind of joke in the family that when I went to spend the night mum never locked the door. That was because I would always get up in the night and come home. I missed my Mum. Grammy had names for me and Brenda. Brenda was the blue-eyed brat and I was the grey-eyed greedy gut. 

The Monks weren’t the only ones who worked hard in those days. I think everybody did. My Mum especially. We never had indoor plumbing in Vanceboro so Mum hauled all her own water. Where from depended on where we were living at the time. When we lived up by the lake our water came from the lake. That’s how I learned to swim. I was over there getting water one day and Larry O’Brien pushed me in. The water was over my head, so the choices were sink or swim. I decided to swim. I probably could have done it a lot sooner, but it was always so easy to put my hands down on the bottom at the boat landing. 

At Grammy’s house there was an Artesian well that Grampy had dug when he built the house. That water was always so nice and cold. The well was lined with river rocks and Mum always told us about how many times she had climbed down those rocks to get a dropped pail. That well also provided our refrigeration. Perishables would be put in a pail and lowered down into the water to be kept cold. At one house we had a well with a pump. The pump always needed priming so we always had to have some water available. Mum usually had some in the tea kettle. In the winter she would have to take the cover off the well and break the ice with the ax to get water. 

Grammy was always teaching us about nature. One day we were out in her garden and she found a big wasp’s nest.  She thought it was empty.  She picked it up and shook it and it rattled so she took it in the house for us to play with. That went well until it warmed up and then the house was full of wasps. Oops!

Life wasn’t easy. We’d get up some mornings and find the 10 quart water pail frozen solid. 

Grammy’s house was never finished upstairs. One room was finished which must have been her and Grampy’s room before he died. The rest of the upstairs was one big unfinished L shaped room. The floor was made of rough cut lumber so there were gaps between many of the boards. In 1954, while Mum was pregnant with my brother she laid a new floor up there. She would carry the board upstairs, measure it, carry it back down and out to the shed and cut it to size with the handsaw then carry it back upstairs and nail it down. In the winter we could lay in bed and see the nails that stuck down through the roof covered with frost. No heat upstairs except what came up through a small vent. 

I never wanted to go upstairs after dark by myself. Grammy had a pile of stuff over in the corner that were her keepsakes. Among that stuff was two picnic baskets. Grammy had lost two babies, one died the same day he was born and the other at the age of 9 months. Grammy talked about them all the time and I was just sure that they were over there in those two picnic baskets. She also had had rheumatic fever as a child and had lost all of her hair. She had braided the hair and had it over there in a box. I thought that was really creepy, but it sounds like something I’d do now. 

I never thought that Grammy liked me but she put up with me because she loved Eileen and we were always together when we were little. Grammy did give us both our love of nature and poetry though.

I liked my little brother until he got too big for his bassinet. Then I had to give up my crib. I was only 6. I thought I should have had several more years in that crib. I did get to move into the big bed with Mum though. Eileen slept in the grey bed that Grampy had built. It didn’t have a box spring so the old mattress drooped down between the slats making a big divot in the middle. We loved that bed and when my cousins would come in the summer we would argue about who was going to sleep in it. 

Grampy’s old carpenter tools were also upstairs in Grammy’s house, kept in a big dilapidated cardboard box. Great fun for a little girl. My favorite was the hand drills. It’s a good thing I never had any sharp drill bits or there would have been holes in everything. One time I was building a toy boat, just a piece of wood with a pointed front. I pounded nails in it to represent the bridge and other things on the deck. Mum told me that if I pounded any more nails into it, it would never float. 

I guess you get the picture that I wasn’t a girly girl. No dolls for me, I preferred cars, trucks, guns, bows and arrows, i.e. boys’ toys. Therefore, if Eileen and I were given dolls she got to play with both of them, which she loved. She especially loved paper dolls. One of my favorite pastimes was climbing trees, much to my mother’s displeasure. I was pretty good at it. I’d climb way up among the electrical wires and then wonder why Mum got upset. When we lived up where the Customs House is now there was an old apple tree in the yard. It was pretty dead. It went up a way and then forked. One day I decided to climb it. I climbed up to the fork then out on one trunk. Lo and behold the tree split down the middle and I fell down landing on my back with half the tree on top of me. I can still see Mum striding across the yard with the ax in her hand. She cut down the other half of the tree and said, “There, that’s one you won’t climb again.”

Mum sometimes hired herself out to do spring or fall cleaning for people. The two that I remember distinctly were Gladys Keef’s house — from the time I stepped foot through the door I was in love with that house — and a house down Salmon Brook Road. I don’t remember who lived there then but my cousin Greg Grass lives there now. Maybe somebody else knows who owned it in the 50’s. 

One summer day Mum and us girls were out picking raspberries, I don’t know the name of the road, but it’s the one that now goes to Richard Monk’s and other camps. It wasn’t much of a road then, just a woods road. Mum would fill a bucket with berries, leave it sitting and start filling another. Eileen and I were picking too, but probably eating as many as made it into our buckets. Mum heard a noise behind her and turned to look. There was a bear sitting on his rump eating out of one of her filled buckets. She took my hand and Eileen’s hand and started running for home. I don’t think our feet hit the ground for the whole trip. 

If you had an outhouse, and I think that probably about half of Vanceboro still did, it needed to be cleaned about once a year. When I say cleaned I’m not talking about the way you clean your bathroom today. I remember Bobby McIver cleaning Grammy’s once. He dug a big hole out behind the toilet, then took the boards off the back and shoveled the waste out into the hole. You’re a bigger man than I am, Bobby. Grammy grew the best strawberries ever out behind the toilet, hmmmmmmm. 

On somewhat the same subject: remedies. Mum was a big believer in Ex-lax. Got a headache? You need an Ex-lax. Got a belly ache? You need an Ex-lax. Got bad breath? You need an Ex-lax. In first or second grade my brother took the chocolate Ex-lax to school and graciously shared it with his friends.

Bobby was a good kid. He’d often come and split and/or carry wood for Mum. He was friendly and funny. I think he visited everybody in town and everybody liked him. One time when we were in grade 5 or 6 Bobby did cartwheels all the way from the school to the post office just to show that he could.

Grammy used to hire the high school boys to shovel her path in the winter. One time John Gardner was shoveling and she was paying him 50 cents an hour. She said that he spent as much time leaning on the shovel as he did working so she timed him and only paid him for his time shoveling, not leaning. 

Grammy had a radio and when we lived with her we always woke up to the radio playing “In the Mood.” It must have been the theme song for some program that Grammy listened to because it was on every morning. That and the smell of perking coffee greeted us every morning.

When we lived up by the lake we lived in what we called the white house. Why? Because it was painted white of course. This was a three-room house: kitchen and two bedrooms. The night we moved in it rained. Eileen and I were sleeping in a double bed in one of the bedrooms when I realized that the roof was leaking and it was leaking onto our bed. I hollered to Mum and when she turned on the light we could see that it was dripping right into Eileen’s face and she was sleeping right through it. I got up and helped Mum move the bed to the other side of the room and guess what? The bed legs went right down through the floor. Nice house. 

Then one day we had friends over and we were playing school in the back room when Sandra Beers’ chair legs went down through the floor. Funny but not funny. 

Mum wouldn’t want me to tell this next story but she’s not here so…. We were living in the white house when Mum sold her wedding ring. A man from Lambert used to come around buying gold. He’d bring his little scale and weigh the gold and give you what he thought it was worth. Mum needed to pay the light bill so she sold him her wedding ring for $1. I remember her crying after he left even though our father had been gone for years. 

Perley Stairs lived next door to us when we lived there. He had one arm missing below the elbow but he could do anything that anybody else could do. He chopped his own wood, kept his house clean, did his own wash, and picked up bottles for us girls. He was a quiet man. I think he was a widower. I talked to him a lot when he was out sitting on his front step. I had never been in his house until the day that we had a chimney fire in ours. I had been out ice skating up and down the road (our road never got plowed as well as the rest), when Mum hollered to me to go and get Owen Clendenning because we had a fire. She took Brian and went next door to Perley’s while he tried to put out the fire. I ran all the way to Owen’s house on my ice skates even though after the dam the road was bare tar. Owen was fire chief and he got going right up to our house. I stood on the inside stairs at their house with Sandy Clendenning while she tried to comfort me by telling me that if the fire was very bad we’d see smoke. She was right, it wasn’t very bad, just a chimney fire and one wall got pretty hot where the chimney went up through. I ran back home and went into Perley’s house with Mum until the men got the fire out. I was amazed that Perley had a radio! Years later my Aunt Leone told me that she had lived in that house, Perley’s, and that my cousins Kay and Jackie had been born there. This is where we lived when I broke my ankle on the bicycle.

Across the road in on the shoreline was the remains of the Alice May, a boat that used to go up and down the lake in different capacities. Here’s what I found online about the Alice May: This boat was 88 feet in length, 30 feet in width, and was powered by two 55 horsepower engines. It was a sternwheeler, which carried five cords of hardwood for fuel. It was named “Alice May” after Clint Keef’s wife, Nee: Alice May Taylor. It was used on Spednic and Palfrey Lakes by the St. Croix Log Driving Company to tow logs down the lakes to St. Croix. The logs were then stream-driven to the sawmills in Milltown and St. Stephen. Some of the men who worked on this boat were: Billy Scott, Dave Nason, Billy MacDonald, Alex MacDonald, Clint Keef, Charles Keef, Jim Tague, and Fraser Mason.

This boat was used until 1912. After the Company discontinued towing logs, it lay on the Vanceboro shore. Later the boiler and one engine were taken to Cottrell to power a Saw Mill for John Depow. Anyway, we weren’t supposed to play around the old boat hull so guess what? We did. It was fun and I don’t know that any of us ever got hurt there.

The Smiths lived right across the field from us and we hung around there a lot and with Dottie a lot. Where the two roads forked, just past the dam, an old man named Mathias Kelly lived. We were all scared to death of him. When we’d be out in the evening, or even close to dark we’d walk as far as his house and then Dottie would take off running one way to her house and Eileen and I would take off running like the wind in the other direction to get home. 

The Smiths had a big barn with work horses, a cow and I don’t remember what else. We loved riding the work horses much better than riding that stubborn pony that they had. Bill Smith was a big tease. He was going to show me one time how to milk the cow. Sure, he didn’t tell me that as soon as I sat down on the stool the cow was going to slap me upside the head with her tail because I didn’t know what I was doing. 

Pearl Smith had a whole passel of kids, but it didn’t seem to bother her that half the neighborhood kids were there too. I don’t know how she put up with us. We used to love it when Corn had the horses hooked to the wagon or the sleigh and would take us all for rides, especially nice when the horses had their bells on. Unlike kids today, we were never at a loss for something to do. No matter who we were with somebody always had a jump rope in their pocket. We also played kick the can, hide and seek, 1, 2, 3 red light, Simon says and many others. Sometimes we’d get beer cans and step on them so that they would stay on our shoes and we could clomp around pretending we were horses. 

For somebody who never owned a bike I sure had bad luck with them. When I was in grade 3, we had come home from school for lunch and were on our way back on Eileen’s bike. Our cousin Norma was pedaling the bike with Eileen and me on the back fender. Eileen and I got to fooling around and winding our feet around one another and I wound my foot right into the spokes. They pried me out and Norma carried me home. Mom sent for Chrissie Beers. She came over and when she saw that I had a compound fracture (three bones) of my ankle she and mom put me in Chrissie’s car and took me to McAdam. We met Dr. O’Keefe walking down the street all dressed for hunting and with his shotgun over his arm. We picked him up and headed for the hospital in Harvey. The hospital wasn’t open but Dr. O’Keefe had a key so we went in and he set my ankle with no anesthesia! I don’t think I ever cried so hard in my life. I was out of school for months until my Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Gracie got me some crutches. 

The other time was when I was up to McIver’s with Margaret and Elaine and they were going downtown on their bikes. They said that I could take Johnny’s bike, so I did. We got to Cobb’s hill and the chain came off the bike. No brakes. I hit the rail right beside the crossing and over the handlebars I went, right into all that crushed coal. Louis Hanson picked me up, brushed me off and took me home. For months mom picked coal dust out of my scrapes and washed them out with peroxide. Did I ride a bike after that? Yes, yes I did, every chance I got.

Linda Smith, Muriel Nason’s granddaughter and cousin to Dottie and Bill and siblings, used to come every summer to stay with her grandmother. We were fast friends. When I went to spend the night with Linda, I did stay all night, don’t ask me why. Muriel played the piano and her son, Ricky, Linda, her brother Dale and I would sing along. Muriel also went swimming with us at the boat landing. We used to laugh at her because she never took her glasses off when she went swimming. I loved riding around with them in Muriel’s little two-tone Fiat. I thought that was the coolest car. Muriel had the time to play cards with us too and we did a lot of that.

Sometime between 3rd grade and 5th we moved down to Sue and Joe Conrad’s house, just past the customs house and where the current customs house is. It was a nice little house. Kitchen and bedroom in the back and a big front room. There was also a garage, so for the first time in her life Mum could get her wood put in under cover and cut it there too. The toilet was in the garage also. This is where we lived at the time of the apple tree incident. 

One day Mum’s friend, Vivian Lounder, came over from St. Croix. It was winter and she had on a jacket with big sleeves and had her arms crossed and hands tucked into her sleeves. She said she had something for Brian and could he have it? Mum said of course he could have it. When Viv pulled her hands out of her sleeves one of them held a puppy! He was the cutest little fella. Mum had never allowed us to have pets because she said that she had all she could do to feed us without adding animals to the mix. But Sandy was a gift and she had already said yes, so…. We hadn’t had him very long when Brian dropped him and apparently broke his leg. No vets locally and no money for one if there was, so he stayed in his bed and we babied him until his leg got better. 

Sandy was never tied up or kept on a leash, almost everybody’s dogs ran loose then, and when he was a couple of years old he was gone for a couple of days and came home with a bullet hole through his neck. The wound where the bullet came out was pretty big and, like I said, no money for vets. He crawled in under the house and wouldn’t come out so we kept putting food and water under there for him and after a while he came out and healed. He was a tough old pooch and we loved him. He was still living when we moved to Bangor and he went to live with Okie Glew. 

Speaking of Okie, he worked at the mill in Woodland and when Mum could afford it, she would pay him $20 and he would bring her a pickup truckload of mill ends to use as firewood. One time we got a railroad tie from somewhere and Mum, with a little help from some neighborhood boys, got it cut up small enough to burn. Of course, it was full of creosote so on the nights when Mum dared to burn a piece of it she would stay up all night because she was afraid of a house fire. We didn’t have any fire/heat at night as a rule. Sometimes we all slept in one bed because it was warmer that way. Mom and the little kids would sleep at the head of the bed and Eileen and I at the foot. I hated getting up on cold mornings and never gave a thought to Mum who got up before us, started the fire and hung our jackets inside out beside the stove so that they would be warm for us to put on.

I loved to fish and my aunt Gracie Crocker gave me my first fishing pole. Actually, it was her fly pole that she had broken the end off. I fished every day in the summer and then next summer Gracie bought me my first spinning rod. Nothing like white perch for supper. Eileen didn’t fish, but one day she and her friends decided that they would and Mum let her take my fishing pole. I was not happy. I went up to the bridge and tried to take it away from her but she and her friends wouldn’t let me. They started walking down river on the rocks and I followed them. When they had had enough of me they tied me to a tree with my own fishing line and left me there. Brats! When I couldn’t find any worms to use for bait Grammy would give me a little piece of salt pork. It worked just as good as the worms did. One day I caught a big eel. I didn’t want to take it off the hook so I carried it home still on the line. Mom cut its head off with the ax and took the hook out for me because I only had one hook.

Before I go any further, I should explain about my Aunts Grace. There were three of them. Aunt Gracie was Lawrence’s wife; Lawrence was Mum’s brother. Aunt Grace was Mum’s sister and Crazy Aunt Grace was my grandmother’s sister. I know, crazy isn’t a politically correct word but not knowing any real definitions for mental illness, crazy was what we called people with mental illness and it certainly fit in this case.

Crazy Aunt Grace lived in a little house up by the dam, right between Mathias Kelly’s house and Russell’s store. She spent quite a bit of time at Grammy’s house. She had white hair that was really a dull yellow white but she thought it was beautiful and nobody argued with her. One day at Grammy’s house she was combing her hair and, of course, some hair came out in the comb. She cleaned the hair from the comb and threw it in the wood stove. Grammy asked her why she didn’t throw it outside instead of in the stove to stink. She said, “because if I throw it outside and it gets cold I’ll get a headache.” She also would run outside whenever she heard a plane fly over and wave to it — she always said that they waved their wings at her. She had had a husband at one time but not by the time I knew her. She was Preston Knowlton’s mother, I mentioned him earlier.

Aunts Grace and Doris, Mum’s sisters lived in Massachusetts and used to come in the summer for a week or so. That’s how we got to know our cousins. Grace, Doris and families would usually rent Clarence Monk’s camp down river. It was a good time for us because we got to go down there as well as spend time with them at Grammy’s. There was always lots of food when they were there and different kinds of food than we were used to (there were only so many things that Tid Sears could carry in his little store). Grace always admonished Mum because we kids didn’t have a set bedtime. She should have realized that when you live in a 3 room house with no doors on the rooms there’s no sense in sending the kids to bed. Mum always told Grace that we had sense enough to go to bed when we got tired. Every fall Doris would send us a big box of clothes that her girls had outgrown. Some people might not like hand me downs but we looked forward to that box every year. Not that we didn’t have what we needed, Mum always made sure of that, but there wasn’t any extra and certainly no ball gowns like one year came in the box. Sometimes Doris and Grace would make a trip to Maine by themselves to gather drift wood. They’d fill the trunk and the back seat with as much as they could find. They said that people in Massachusetts would pay big money for it to use for decoration. 

I was close to my cousin Steve, so when I was 10 or 11 Grace thought that it would be a good idea if I came to stay with them in Mass. for the summer. I thought it would be quite an adventure. I lasted about a week and a half, then I wanted to come home because I missed my mother. Anyway, they didn’t have any boat landing or any place to fish. What fun is that? Grace sent me home by bus and I had a 4 or 5 hour layover in Calais. While I was sitting in a Calais restaurant eating a sandwich for lunch Tid Sears came in and asked what I was doing there. I told him that I was waiting for the 6 o’clock bus. So he gave me a ride home. Mum didn’t even know that I was on my way. We had no phone.

Memorial Day was a big deal in Vanceboro. We always had a parade that went from the Legion Hall to the cemetery. It seems like most of the town marched in the parade, there would be the Legion members, Boy Scouts, Knights of Pythias, and the school kids grade by grade and I don’t know who else. At the cemetery there would be speeches and a 21 gun salute. It was so nice with the officiants and veterans standing up on the hill in the cemetery as well as some people waving branches. The cemetery would be all decorated with flowers and flags. My great aunt Marie always sent huge wreaths made out of some kind of leaves to put on her brother Roland McLaughlin’s grave. He died in WWI and their parents are buried with him. But it wasn’t all about the parade, even as kids we knew why we were celebrating: to express our gratitude to those who fought and died so that we can live the way we do. So grateful for freedom!

When I was almost 11 and Eileen almost 13, Mum had another baby, our sister Teresa. Neither of us knew that she was going to have a baby, such things were never talked about at our house. Sandra Beers told me that Mum was going to have a baby and I beat the tar out of her for saying such a thing about my mother. The other time I beat her up was when she told me that when I was born I didn’t have any clothes on. I just couldn’t believe that. While Mum was in hospital Brian and I went up to stay with our Aunt Leone. Eileen stayed home by herself. When Chrissie Beers brought Mum home and she got out of the car with the baby, she leaned down so that Brian could see her. Brian was almost 5. Teresa was crying and Brian said, “Oh Mama, why didn’t you bring me a puppy instead of that blatting brat?” I suppose that’s why we later got Sandy. Thanks Teresa. 

Having a baby in the house was fun at that age. I never liked dolls but I liked taking care of and playing with this baby. She was so tiny. She weighed 4 lbs and 6 ozs and was almost 2 feet long, so she was a string bean. I didn’t know why then, but she had a hard time taking her bottle. Almost everything came right back out through her nose. One day I was holding her while Mum was fixing her bottle and she was crying; I asked Mum why she didn’t have a little dangly thing in her throat like I did. Mum said it was called a palate and that she was born without one; that’s why most of her milk came right back out. It was called a cleft palate and included the soft and hard palate so there was no roof in her mouth. I couldn’t wait for Teresa to get big enough so that I could go walking around with her on my hip like Dottie Smith did with her siblings. Teresa was born at the end of September, so she had to make it through the winter before I’d be able to take her out and show her off. Poor baby, she was always hungry and Mum couldn’t monitor how much she was eating because of the loss through her nose.

 I’ve talked a lot about our summer activities, but we had a lot of fun in the winter too. Sliding was pretty much every day if we had a snowy winter. Diagonally across from the school, was the big field that was between Hartley Lounder’s house and Monk’s, where we sometimes played baseball. If we started on our sled up by Harry Davis’ house we could slide diagonally across the field right down to Water Street across from Clendenning’s. We would slide after school until supper time and some of the kids would go back after supper. Not me, getting soaked to the skin once a day was enough for me. Unless, of course, we were going to slide down at the hollows behind McAleney’s house. That was such fun, I don’t know whose toboggans we used but we would start at the top of one hill, slide down and go half the way up the hill on the other side. We would climb to the top of that hill and do the same thing in reverse. Sleds were no good here, it was toboggan or flying saucer. 

There was also ice skating at the duck pond. We were never allowed to go until one of the townsmen had been out to test the ice by cutting through it to see how thick it was and if it was safe. I learned to skate on Sandra Beers’ hockey skates, so when we got figure skates for Christmas I had to learn all over again. It was so much fun though. So many kids and almost always a big fire at the edge of the ice. Sometimes somebody would get a tire or two to throw on the fire and then it would really roar. We’d just skate or play chase or crack the whip or Red Rover. It was a happy time, however I wouldn’t go back to living with no heat in the night for love or money. 

Sometimes we would go skating at the rink in McAdam. That was nice. They had a girls changing room and a boys changing room where we would take off our boots and put on our skates. There was a big stove in the middle of the changing room so that we could warm up. I liked going to McAdam to skate because there were lots of boys there. Oops, did I really say that? If you were lucky a boy would ask you to skate with him. Of course, when we were skating at the rink there was always music through a speaker. Fascination was one of my favorite songs to skate to. Sometimes my cousin Arnie Gillies would take me out to skate and I never told the other girls that he was my cousin. He was cool. One time Joyce and Betty McIver’s mother took us over to skate. She went to visit her mother and we were playing chase on the ice. Eileen was chasing Betty. Betty hit the boards on the side of the rink. The boards were probably just about waist high and when she hit it she went over head first and her feet came up in the air. The end of her skate hit Eileen in the forehead and caused quite an injury. Betty’s mother came and they cleaned Eileen up and patched her up with band aids and we went home. Not much doctoring in those days unless we were in dire straits.

We went to Aunt Velma’s in McAdam fairly often, at least every couple of months. It cost $1 one way for a taxi and we’d usually stay for supper. Aunt Velma was a great cook but I didn’t like that we had butter with no color. It used to come like that and have a little packet of color with it that you could mix in, but she never did so it looked like we were eating lard. Aunt Velma was funny, she wasn’t happy unless she was complaining about somebody or something. She could laugh at herself too, though. She and Uncle Sparky with Arnie and David came to our house one time and Mum didn’t have anything to feed them for supper so she sent me to the store with a list. When I got to the store I insisted on reading the list instead of just handing it over to Tid. But when I got to bologna I couldn’t read it so I didn’t get any. Mum was not happy. That was what she had planned to serve for supper and now the store was closed because I went all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to get there and back. 

If we wanted to go to the movies in McAdam we usually hitchhiked. We always went to the matinee, first because it was less expensive –17 cents as opposed to 25 cents in the evening; and secondly so we wouldn’t be hitchhiking after dark. At first we’d go over to the Canada Customs building in St. Croix and wait for somebody we knew to stop and give us a ride. After awhile though, if there was more than one of us we would start walking out the road and actually stick out our thumb for somebody to stop and pick us up.