Family Beginnings

Apparently Grandma Bertha and Grandpa John believed in the Bible literally where God said, "Go out and repopulate the Earth." They had seven children, as follows: Morley (who married Alice), Sam (who married Hattie), Theodore (who married Gertrude), Len (whom I don't recall), Minnie (who married Percy), Grace (Mom, who married Carol), and Letty (who died young).


Letty, the youngest, was a frail child who refused to give up nursing until she was over three years old. Mom told me she remembered Letty running around after her mother, crying, "I want my titty!!" Mom told me very little more, and not even how old she was when she died.

Mom's other sister, Minnie, was the oldest, and she lived to be ninety-nine. Her last year was spent in the Mars Hill nursing home. She had a zest for life to the end, even though she had lost all but her peripheral vision. About six months before she died, someone brought her a container of strawberry yogurt. She fell in love with it, wished she had heard of it long before, and couldn't get her fill of it after that. One of the joys of her stay in that nursing home was that my brother Johnny's wife, Marian, brought her homemade baked beans as a treat! She hated nursing home food.

When Aunt Minnie had first been married, she and Uncle Percy had a beautiful farm in Fort Fairfield, with many acres of potatoes, horses, cows, poultry, and a large and vicious turkey who held me trapped in the outhouse for several hours one day. In spite of that, I loved visiting the farm and, in fact, when given the choice of going to the Presque Isle Fair or visiting the farm, I chose the farm. I loved collecting eggs , still warm, right out from under the hens in the coop. To me, that was heaven on Earth. Perhaps the best part of it all was that Aunt Min was one of the greatest cooks in the world, and she let me get my busy little hands right in the middle of her cooking. What a lucky child I was! And that was just the beginning of my many blessings!



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