One Baby Loon and Counting!

Gretchen Farnsworth reported this afternoon that one baby loon has hatched and she believes there is another that will hatch soon. The mother loon is back on the nest with her baby, so that is a good sign. Please stay away from the nesting area and also from the loon family when you see them out on the water. There are enough predators for the loons to worry about without them having to put up with boats and humans. Please warn your guests to stay far away from loons on the water, too. Sometimes people aren't aware that it is illegal to harass these birds, or how important protecting the loon population is in this state. So let guests or renters know, please. Gretchen will keep us posted about if/when a second baby is born.

I have spent a good share of the day going through old photos and letters my cousin brought to me earlier this week. They are of people on my mother's side, the McAllan's who came here in 1909 from Scotland. They lived in East Barre for many years, and these pictures were in a collection my aunt Jeannie had - actually her name was Jane, but she was always "Jeannie" to her family. I found some wonderful pictures of the family that I hadn't seen before, including some of my mother when she was a young girl. Now I need to scan the photos and get them filed with identification and dates, as close as possible.

The letters will probably have to wait. They aren't really very old - the earliest were mailed in the early 1940s - but I'm hoping there will be some bits of information in them that may help me put together more background on why my grandfather and grandmother left their home in Scotland. He was a blacksmith, and she worked as a nurse in Torphins, Aberdeenshire. My grandfather came first and found a job at the East Barre quarries. My grandmother followed a few months later, with their six young girls. Only my mother and her younger brother were born in this country. Life was difficult for the family here - I have to wonder what was so much worse in Scotland - or perhaps they had misconceptions of life here in the states and might have returned to their homeland, had they been able to afford passage. I never heard it discussed. And I also never heard any of my aunts complain, either about conditions in Scotland or their life here. They were all typically "Scottish frugal" - and my cousin asked me the other day if my mother "made aprons and things out of bits of salvaged material." I laughed, remembering  how sheets worn thin in the middle were cut up to make pillowcases, aprons, pot holders padded with bits of old towels or blankets, etc. Absolutely nothing went to waste. One of my aunts made beautiful shag rugs with bits of leftover cloth remnants. She taught me how to make them, by knitting and folding short strips of cloth between the stitches - using saved cotton string, of course. Back then, packages came tied with string, not sticky tape, and grocers had big spools of it hanging over their counters where they packaged up meat and other items in paper and tied the packages with string. It all got saved. We had a big ball of string in a deep draw in our kitchen. It was very handy.

My cousin and I had a good time chatting over lunch on the porch and going through some of the old photos. It's goknow yod to our roots. I have more questions than answers at this point, but I'm confident some of the answers are in those letters. In the meantime, I feel privileged to have known all of the McAllan sisters - they were a happy, chatty group and their Scotch accent was sometimes beyond me, although since I had grown up hearing it, I could follow most of what they were saying. However, I never learned to speak it, even though my aunt Minn tried to teach me one winter when I boarded with her during highschool. She finally gave up, telling me I had "too much Yankee" in me. Indeed!