Remembering Mom

My mother was born on October 13, 1908. She was what I considered an intelligent woman, with both feet firmly planted in reality - except for when her birthday fell on a Friday. Other times that Friday fell on the 13th of any month of the year were like any other day, but she dreaded having her birthday fall on a Friday. I never found out why having her birthday fall on Friday the 13th bothered her so much. I suspect she was secretly somewhat superstitious. There were incidents with tea leaf readings, plants flowering out of season, birds flying into windows, and a few other things that I look back on now as probably having some dark meaning in her mind.

Mom was the youngest of seven girls, with one younger brother. The family had immigrated from Scotland in 1906; first her blacksmith father, William, arriving a few months ahead of his family in order to find a job and living accommodations. This turned out to be in East Barre where he was a blacksmith at one of the stone quarries. When his wife, Jane Robie McAllan arrived with six young daughters, he met them in Boston and together they traveled to their new home in Vermont. Those were difficult years, I suspect, but the quarries in Barre were booming and there were immigrants from a variety of countries working there. This photo was taken about 1911. That would be my mother on her mother's lap, and her young brother, Orlo on their father's lap.

My grandfather McAllan was strict - even cruel - in raising his daughters. I'm not sure if he was always hot-tempered or if that evolved after his wife, Jane, died in 1921 leaving him with seven girls and an eight-year-old son to raise. Whatever the reason, the sisters often told how one of them would step in to take the whipping, sometimes done with a fishing pole or whatever their father happened to have at hand, for my mother or her younger brother. They only talked about those years when they were together after their father died in 1942. He came to live with us after his second wife died in the early 1940s, and my mother told him firmly that he was never to lay a hand on me. He never did, although I'm sure he was sometimes tempted. 

My mom had red hair and freckles. She worked as a maid for the Jackson family in Barre while she went to high school, and later waitressed in the White Mountains. She graduated from Spaulding High School and took teacher's training. Her first teaching job was at the old school on Cabot Plain. She was instrumental, along with parents of those students, in getting a new school building. However, she went to teach in West Danville and didn't teach at the new school until years later.

 She stood a little over five feet tall but I've seen her grasp nearly-grown young men by their hair and shake them in their seats at school when they misbehaved. I once saw a parent wither before her snapping blue-green eyes and sharp reprimand when he tried to bully her into releasing his 8th grade son who was staying after school to finish an assignment. My mother firmly told the father she was not releasing his son until he finished his lesson, and he (the father) should either leave of sit down and listen, adding curtly, "You may learn something." He sat down and he never appeared at school on behalf of his son again. How did I happen to witness that? I went to school two years in West Danville where my mother was my teacher.We both returned to the Plains School in about 1942, and in 1948 the Plains School closed and she taught in Cabot Village for several years before moving on to work at the Vermont Department of Social Welfare.

Mom was fun. She (and my aunts) taught me the foxtrot; we hosted family dinners almost every Sunday during the summer, and I learned to understand their Scotch brogue, but never mastered speaking it. Winters were spent reading or knitting and taking long snowshoe hikes through the fields and woods with my father. We did lots of things together, but come summer, she did laundry for campers, mostly on the west shore of Joe's Pond and sometimes worked at Milligan's store to supplement our family income. My father received $6 a week on the farm - supplemented by our wood for fuel, milk, and meat, but there was little money to spare. I raised chickens, so we had our own source of eggs - and sometimes it seemed we ate "chicken every Sunday." Female teachers were poorly paid in those days, and even though they didn't get paid during the summer, every few years they had to take summer courses to keep their teaching license current. Mom took courses at UVM and sometimes Goddard College. I went with her at least one year while she had courses at Goddard. I worked in a nursery school during mornings and spent the afternoons taking a course in sculpting at Goddard or just enjoying exploring the Goddard campus. Those were great one-on-one years and we both enjoyed meeting a variety of people at the college, many of whom became friends and remained so over the years.

We enjoyed having birthdays in the same month - and both being Libras, I suppose we shared some similar personality traits, although I expect that would have to do more with DNA than the month we were born. Anyway, I'm thinking of her today, not at all wary of it being Friday the 13th, just thinking of my loving, feisty, sometimes eccentric, often opinionated, and always efficient in the traditional-Scottish-fashion Mom, with lots of love and wonderful memories.