The Women Who Raised Me

prologue

The Viewing

For anyone who has spent any portion of their childhood as a ward of the state, the notion of emancipation has multiple meanings. Though I was legally and financially emancipated at the requisite age of eighteen and had always been fiercely independent, it wasn’t until I was forty-three years old and a working mother of two that I finally set myself free.

The turning of the wheels that led to my true emancipation began some time in mid-2002 when I did the unthinkable, something that (at least where I come from and where I live, work, and drive in L.A.’s fast lane) has always been taboo: I became still.

Into a cave of introspection I crept while a tidal wave of memories and feelings crashed upon me all at once. Overwhelmed by primal rip currents that I had supposedly outdanced, outrun, outswum, and outloved, I reached out to all that was tangible, real, and known about my early life—facts, documents, records, chronologies, even maps.

Of particular interest was a medical report of an event that took place in 1968 in Portland, Maine, that had gone unreported by the press. It involved a middle-aged Caucasian woman by the name of Dorothy Mabel Collins who was severely injured when—in order to escape an unidentified pursuer—she leapt from the third-floor balcony of her apartment.

Barely breathing, she was rushed by ambulance to the local emergency room. A descendant of bona fide Yankee blood, Dorothy called on the survival skills of her Howland-Collins forebears. They had come from the rocky shores of rugged Anglo-Saxon England, settling into similar straits in Castine, Cape Jellison in Stockton Springs, and Searsport, Maine, as well as various points in Massachusetts in the early 1800s. Before that, an early ancestor, John Howland, made the voyage to America aboard the Mayflower. It was never made clear if he had jumped ship or fell overboard, but one thing was certain, Howland survived. This history was documented by Dorothy’s sister, Elizabeth Collins Babineau, a former member of the Mayflower Society. Dorothy was a twelfth-generation descendant of John Howland. As her daughter, I am a member of the thirteenth generation.

The Collins clan scattered itself across American history: My great-grandfather, Joseph Collins, was born in 1848 and lied about his age so that he could serve in the Civil War, first a member of the Thirty-first Maine Infantry, then a drummer boy for the Sixteenth Regiment, from 1864 to his discharge on July 17. He had the great honor of meeting President Abraham Lincoln and commented on how soft the president’s hands were. Joseph married Sarah Pressey, whose first husband was lost at sea. Two of their sons, Willard and Warren Collins, became famed doctors of Roxbury, Boston, and Framingham, Massachusetts, and Castine, Maine, in the late 1800s. Warren E. Collins of the Warren E. Collins Company, Boston, Massachussetts, manufactured medical instruments as well as the Collins-Dinker tank respirator, also known as the iron lung, which saved countless people stricken with bulbar polio. According to my aunt Elizabeth, these were the more toney Collinses. My grandfather Harry S. Collins, decided not to go into a medical profession; instead, he became a fisherman, working on the weirs in Castine Harbor, Searsport, and Stockton Springs. The Collins family was of good pedigree and strong marriages and the family name would not be tarnished even if Warren Collins Jr.’s wife, Helen, hung herself. My great-aunt Zillah loved to paint as much as she might have loved other women but was prohibited to do so. They were a hardy stock throughout New England. The Mayflower, the iron lung, the famed Collins-Sawyer doctors of Massachusetts—Dorothy was descended from all of this.

And despite her fall from three floors, and the dire predictions about her ability to survive this ordeal, Dorothy escaped death this time, at least as it was measured in mortal terms. But she was never able to escape her insidious predator: schizophrenia, a debilitating hereditary disease.

During that period in mid-2002, I tried to disentangle my own history from the few remnants of information I had managed to salvage about Dorothy.

Over the years, my mother and I met in person no more than three times. Following her actual death from lung cancer in September 1983, I had made unsuccessful attempts to reclaim her for posterity, if for no one but myself. That was what I told my daughter, Maya Elizabeth, during a 2004 Fourth of July Rowell-Collins family reunion and barn raising in Paris, Maine. We rented a fishing boat in Camden; the captain navigated the waters, docking safely in Castine Harbor. On foot, I returned with my daughter, walking past palatial summer camps built by wealthy cotton, lumber, and shoe industrialists, formally known as the Rusticators, who vacationed there in the 1800s, calling it The Summer Playground of the Nation. We arrived at Dorothy’s burial site, high on a knoll where she was laid to rest in the family plot amid untold numbers of ancestors. Scattered throughout the cemetery were the Bevans, the Sawyers, and the Collinses. On our knees, Maya and I cleared the weeds around my mother’s stone, no wider than twenty inches across, flush with the earth. I often wondered if her family had sunk her stone into the earth deliberately, amid all the illustrious ancestral headstones in the cemetery, out of view and perhaps out of mind.

I looked across the vista, imagining the battles fought between the French, British, Dutch, and Americans—from the Breda Treaty in 1667 deeding the land to Jean Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin, to the British evacuation in 1815, when Castine finally became an American town. This history was important to me as my own personal history. I could not forget Dorothy, no matter how circuitous our journey had been; I knew she loved me.

Life counts not hours by joy or pains,

But just by duties done.

And when I lie on the green kirkyard

With the mould upon my breast,

Say not that she did well or ill,

Only she did her best.

—Dorothea L. Dix, 1802–1887

My dear friend Dura Winder took a picture of Maya and me after we placed fresh-cut wildflowers around Dorothy’s stone. I sat on the grass next to my mother in death and hoped that my fifteen-year-old daughter, Maya, in life, would continue to make this pilgrimage in my absence to sing this poem to her grandmother.

In 1999 I made a trip alone to Maine to visit the aging Hallowell granite-and-brick asylum where my mother had spent portions of her adult life. It is one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in the nation, which opened in October 1840 under the direction of Dr. Cyrus Knapp and world famous Dr. Isaac Ray as the Maine Insane Hospital ten years after Governor Jonathan Hunton urged in his annual address to the legislature the need for a mental institution. It was later known as the Augusta Mental Health Institute, once treating as many as eighteen hundred patients at a time. I became a human camera, snapping and freezing images in rapid succession over the course of my drive there by rental car. At first glimpse, the nineteenth-century sprawling Victorian estate was the ghostly manor I had expected, guarded by wrought-iron gates through which I drove tentatively. Later, I learned that a number of buildings on the grounds had been used for ammunitions storage during the Civil War. Hopeful, afraid, and determined, I forged on.

After parking, I slowly climbed the steps past an administrator, too preoccupied to notice me, and brazenly ascended the fine mahogany staircase. I soon became unnerved and went back downstairs to the reception area to explain myself. Behind a glass window, the receptionist’s face showed classic, weathered Maine lines and silver hair as she invited me to go upstairs, where I was shown into a parlor. There, I was introduced to the director of the asylum; his face and voice personified kindness. He bore no remarkable traits of age or accent and was of such striking Cary Grant good looks that I wondered what he was doing there. I asked if he remembered my earlier calls.

Yes, he said, and nodded his agreement, remembering my phone call and to let me go to where Dorothy had once slept.

With my heart pounding wildly, I could see the ends of my curls vibrating as we approached her door. Then it opened.

Although it was a gray day, light streamed in through a gable. I felt the atomic fragments of Dorothy’s faded presence and, I daresay, her anguish. In the background were patients, languishing in a medicinal haze, perhaps holding on to the hope that someday a loved one might come to rescue them. But this day, I had come to rescue and resurrect my mother.

Of course, my mother, Dorothy, wasn’t there at all. She remained there as I had frozen her in my imagination in this cold, yet strangely serene place. A place she so desperately wanted to escape from. A place from where she had written so many letters to me, never describing where she was—only where she wasn’t.

I asked to see every room, every corner. I went to the morgue, to the rooftop, to the industrial-size laundry room where Dorothy had worked, to the vast exterior where sun peeked through clouds sending pools of light on fields once farmed by my mother as a kind of occupational therapy. I continued to walk to the river bank overlooking the state capitol separated by the Kennebec. I remembered reading that in 1840 Governor John Fairfield believed the site was chosen so that future legislatures and governors would see it out their windows and never forget this hospital that housed one hundred lunatic persons, furiously mad. Slowly I walked back to the buildings and was escorted to the basement where there had once been holding cages, the wrought iron gates now removed from the granite. I poked my index finger into one of the holes, crossed the threshold, sat down, and cried with my mother’s anguished tears.

I had felt something for Dorothy from the moment we first met, even though her visit was unannounced to Forest Edge, the farm in West Lebanon, Maine, an almsfarm township in the 1800s, where I spent my early childhood.

No one, not even Agatha, the woman I called Ma, explained who this outsider was. We were black. She was not. For me, at seven years old, the world broke down simply that way. Still, she was more than a stranger. In her pink gingham food-stained dress, hair swept up into a messy French twist. Compromised beauty. All tortured.

As an adult I acquired a photograph of a much different Dorothy Mabel Collins Rowell, taken in the 1950s. She had Elizabeth Taylor good looks. Creamy white skin, thick black hair, laughing eyes. An abandon. Maybe a wild side. She didn’t drink or smoke, I was told, but she loved music, dancing, and strong black military men.

Dorothy bore six children. First there were two boys, then three girls—of whom I was the youngest—and then another boy. We were each of different paternity but all given the last name of Dorothy’s first and only husband, Norman Rowell Sr.—a motorcycle-riding, trailer-inhabiting white man from Bath whose heart was permanently broken when she left him. Eventually Dorothy’s family and the law interceded, deeming Dorothy unfit to raise her four younger children, all born out of wedlock. Whether this had mainly to do with the different fathers being Hispanic and African American was never admitted. Nonetheless, court correspondence does support this conclusion.

Who was my birth mother? How did her mental illness first manifest? The answers were not in a second photograph of Dorothy, on a dark, barren landscape alongside her three storklike, old-crone-looking Collins sisters, whose expressions appear much more disturbed than hers.

My childhood memories were just as cryptic. Though her visit to Forest Edge when I was seven years old had been unexplained at first, I later found out that her three-day stay had been carefully planned in trademark Agatha Armstead fashion—meaning that it was done for a reason, to gently introduce Dorothy to me, paving the way for an understanding of what that word foster meant. It was a word that went before everything, like a prefix, whenever I was introduced to the world. Such explanations had never mattered before at Forest Edge, where residents and regular visitors were all treated as family.

Despite Dorothy’s violent Tardive, Dyskinesia tremors, a type of Parkinson’s caused by years of prescribed Thorazine, chemotherapy, Prolixin, Serentil, Navane, Akineton, Mellaril, Tofranil, Valium, Coqentin, Enanthate, Permitil, and Quide, her unkempt state, the pink gingham dress that was too girlish for a woman who was too young to have hair turned prematurely white, and though I was confused and afraid, there was a gravitational pull between us. It wasn’t a recognition, because I couldn’t see my face in hers. But as she came into first view in the evening twilight, standing awkwardly on the unpaved Barley Road at the foot of the path leading up to the house, I experienced the same farm girl’s response that I had to discarded robin hatchlings that had fallen from their nests. Compassion. I had never seen a woman in such a weakened state. Agatha, Ma to everyone, was the epitome of strength, young looking in her midsixties, a black Bostonian born in the Carolinas, with a mix of Kickapoo Indian in her background.

Come in and take a load off, Ma sang out, beckoning Dorothy inside the house, telling her that supper was ready and waiting for her, leading her to the seat of honor at the head of our royal blue painted dining room table, and communicating to me with her eyes as if to say: Sit closer, she won’t bite. Still a little scared, I smiled politely and bowed my head as Agatha led us in saying grace.

Dorothy rocked back and forth, eating ravenously. Food was barely in her mouth before she pierced the next forkful. From where I sat, it was possible to see her foot shaking uncontrollably. This ravaged person could not be my mother. But that was what Agatha said at this dinner, in front of Dorothy, as honestly, courageously, and plainly as possible.

In time, the simple humanity that had played out in front of my eyes would hang like a jewel in my memory: the unselfishness of two women from two entirely different backgrounds coming together with the sole concern of the child they had in common. But I would have to get past the idea that I was Dorothy’s daughter, born in sin, unable to be absolved no matter how many confessions I made or how many Hail Marys I said.

Ultimately, what mattered most was that I would have to absolve myself for the shame I had felt about Dorothy, for the unintended flashes of feeling that stick in the windpipe of self-forgiveness.

One flash: the horrendous sound of vomiting I hear at age seven from the cot in the dining room where I sleep when company comes. It’s in the middle of the night after dinner, after Dorothy had gorged herself, when she rose to go to the bathroom and woke the house.

Ma’s footsteps followed the thunder of Dorothy vomiting into the bathroom sink.

Ma’s spirited reprimand came next. Dorothy, what on earth are you doing? You will not leave all that mess in the sink. I listened as Ma explained that the children would have to use the bathroom for washing up in the morning before school. Dorothy whimpered in apology as Agatha helped her clean it up.

Why, I wondered, had Dorothy thrown up in the sink and not the toilet?

My world was in jeopardy. Scrunching down into the bedding on the cot, I can think only of how badly I wanted her to leave.

When Monday morning finally came, all I wanted was for the school bus to whisk me away to West Lebanon Elementary. When at last it came, I ran to meet it; my next prayer was that Dorothy wouldn’t follow me anywhere close to where anyone on the bus could see her.

But she did. Not discreetly. Dorothy stood in plain view, there for everyone and God to see, dressed in that same stained pink gingham dress, a prideful mother taking center stage, waving good-bye right at me.

Numb by now, I stumbled to a green leather seat and fixed my eyes straight ahead.

The little girl sitting next to me asked, Who is that?

I don’t know.

I remember my heart beating at an alarming rate—out of embarrassment but also because I had denied Dorothy as my mother. When I came home later that day from school, I found Agatha pruning her prized Double Syringa shrub. As I walked toward her, Agatha turned to me unprovoked and answered the question in my eyes: She’s gone.

I was fifteen years old the next time I laid eyes on Dorothy. I had been living in and around Boston for much of the previous seven years, with various foster families, while studying at the Cambridge School of Ballet. Again, Agatha met an unannounced Dorothy at the Trailways bus station in downtown Boston and lovingly arranged a meeting for us at an adjacent Howard Johnson’s, lending support by her presence. Nothing of note happened during this brief encounter until it was time to leave, and I excused myself to use the bathroom. I couldn’t help but notice Dorothy following me, several steps behind. Once inside, without warning, she grabbed me, sobbing and involuntarily trembling. I’m not sure why I stood there, immobile, in the face of what seemed hideous. But I did.

Helplessly, Dorothy gave me a last embrace, mumbling something incoherent. Mother to child. Her cries became louder and more desperate. Grief-stricken and guilty. In my periphery were other women passing this spectacle in the Howard Johnson’s bathroom, stealing glances. I pried Dorothy’s arms from around my fifteen-year-old waist and said, I can’t be late for ballet class.

Her wet face just looked up at me.

But my last image of her from that meeting came a short while later, as I marched up the cobblestone street to catch my train, when I turned to witness a sight that bound together all the scattered moments of my first fifteen years of life, sending me off into a looming future. There they were, Dorothy and Agatha, arm in arm, linked together in such a way that it was impossible to tell who was supporting whom, both waving, both solemn.

On that day, I waved once and never looked back because I couldn’t bear to do so.

A number of years later, during a period in my early twenties, I was ready to look back but it was too late. By this time I had done an exhaustive search and had found my three brothers, not all of them wanting to be found. However, my main ally was my half-brother David Rowell, second-born in our lineage, another motorcycle-riding, guitar-strumming vintage car enthusiast, who had responded to my initial effort to make contact by climbing on his Harley and roaring all the way down from Maine to Manhattan to meet me. David was the one who called me in the spring of 1983 to tell me that our mother, Dorothy, was dying of lung cancer. Grateful for the information, I tried to get in touch with her, but I was kept at bay by Dorothy’s gatekeeper, her spinster sister Lillian, who wanted nothing to do with me.

Pickled by the vinegar of her meanness, well preserved and energetic for her advanced years, Lillian had no qualms about referring to me as one of the nigger children in a letter she had written to Agatha years earlier. Agatha sat me down one evening after Girl Scouts and read it aloud, unedited, so that I could further understand my circumstances and the hard cold truth about the world I lived in. I was seven years old. Lillian’s insufferable bigotry warned that I should never entertain the idea of visiting Dorothy in Maine, stating that I would be an embarrassment. I almost never crossed that line.

To her only credit, Lillian took care of my mother in the last years of her tortured life. It was there, in Bath, Maine, that my brother David, who was white and lived in a neighboring township, drove me in freezing temperatures in his 1935 Ford pickup so that I could see Dorothy one last time. We stood outside, tossing pebbles at Lillian’s window, calling for our mother, who lay bedridden. Even with the shouted demands of my brother, whom Lillian adored, she remained defiant as we yelled out, Lillian, let us in! She refused, answering with a sealed door.

In September 1983, David phoned me in Boston to say our mother had died. He mentioned that a funeral service was being planned but left the decision of whether to go and the logistics for attending up to me. I immediately realized that although David had accepted me as his sister and his kindness had led him to inform me of our mother’s passing, he would not impose his decisions on the rest of the Collins-Rowell family.

Calling the funeral director at the Mayo Funeral Home proved to be unsuccessful. The funeral is private at the request of the Collins family, he said.

But I’m one of Dorothy Collins Rowell’s children.

I’m sorry, but you’re not on the guest list. He added, Mrs. Rowell only had three sons.

That’s not correct, I said as I shook with anger. She also had three daughters.

Apologizing that there was nothing more that he could do, the funeral director hung up.

With barely enough money for bus fare to travel from Boston to Maine and no money for lodging, I hesitantly called an ex-boyfriend and convinced him to use his credit card to book a room for me at the only motel in the area. I packed a garment bag with my blue-and-white polka-dot dress and my ubiquitous white gloves for my mother’s funeral and I headed out.

The bus, I soon learned, had a final stop some thirty miles away from the funeral home, but dropped me within walking distance to the motel. As I set off, the starless night sky reminded me that by mid-September, temperatures in coastal Maine can be notoriously unpredictable, often plunging to below freezing, with sudden snow flurries—just like the ones that had begun to fall. Though I was not dressed for the onslaught of early winter, I was too focused on reaching my destination to feel the cutting air.

I arrived at the motel, which turned out to be a very low frills truck stop. And worse, the woman at the desk had no reservation for me. Obviously, my ex had failed to make the reservation.

Cold and with no place to sleep, I dug in and curled up on a lobby couch until the night clerk offered, Hey, Miss, I’ve got a used room that a trucker just checked out of. Do you want it? I said, Yes.

The next morning I awoke to a long trek before me. I headed up the ramp on to the highway, in the same clothes that I slept in, with my garment bag slung over my left arm. I had a peace of no understanding as I stuck out my thumb, knowing that my Saint Christopher’s medal would protect me.

I walked backward on the shoulder of the highway, and it wasn’t long before a pickup truck pulled over. We shared few words but the driver was good-natured.

He dropped me off at the edge of town, blocks away from the funeral home, and so I trudged through the melting snow, passing a diner with a small floral shop. A single bell rang above the door as I entered, causing some customers to turn and stare. With my last dollar, I purchased a single red rose.

Finally, I reached the door of the Mayo Funeral Home, a 1920s white clapboard structure on a knoll. I knocked, and from behind a lace-curtained window, the funeral director peered out at me, then opened the door in silence. We did not exchange any words except:

I’m Vicki Rowell, Dorothy’s daughter.

Noticing my garment bag, he said, Please use my room upstairs to change. You are the first to arrive. I thanked him and signed the guest book.

I began to head upstairs but stopped. To my left was Dorothy, lying ever so peacefully, her delicate profile still evident. With all the grace that I could muster, I gently approached, not fearing her lifeless body but rather feeling, even in death, our indisputable bond. We were finally having our visit. I placed the solitary rose in the crease of the cream-tufted casket, to represent her daughters, two of whom were not present, and went upstairs. I looked around the stark bedroom; everything was neatly placed: comb, brush, and other toiletries. I laid my garment bag across the bed and unzipped it, removing my unwrinkled dress. I looked at myself in a small vanity mirror atop a chest of drawers before sliding on the gloves I wore for reasons I kept so secret, I hadn’t even come into a full understanding of their mystery. I reassured myself and headed downstairs.

The Collins family had begun to arrive. Their expressions changed from indignant stares to mild-mannered nods, and even smiles. Some whispered comments, like Oh, she’s not that bad and Can we take a picture of you with your mother?

The Collinses asked in a matter-of-fact manner as though Dorothy was still alive. I realized this would be the only photograph of my mother and me together, so I obliged with the stipulation that they send me copies. And they did.

I stood in front of Dorothy’s casket and looked defiantly into the Collinses’ collective lens. Flash went their cameras. At some point, I was joined by my three older brothers. The look on Lillian’s face when she saw me standing with them was one of disgust and disbelief. She sat by herself on the opposite side of the chapel, staring out a stained-glass window. In my mind, Dorothy was having the last say. And so was I.

Following the service, members of the Collins family invited me to attend the burial. In that moment, I remembered Agatha’s amazing grace, how if it were not for her, I never would have had any relationship with my natural mother. So I simply smiled and said, No, thank you.

David gave me a ride back to the bus station, and I solemnly returned to Boston feeling fulfilled, at least for now. After a lifetime of exclusion and denial, I had found the courage to show up. It was the courage to reveal a family’s secret that I was the human stain on the blue-blood pedigree: Dorothy’s daughter, a thirteenth direct descendant of John Howland, a daughter of Maine. I confronted a part of my family in a funeral home, in Maine, on September 11, 1983. That was the viewing that had truly taken place.

But maybe there was another reason I didn’t attend her burial. Maybe I wasn’t ready to let her go. In the days and years that followed, I tried to know the mother who had evaded me all that time, not only with visits to her gravesite, and later to the mental asylum in Augusta, but by obtaining her records from the state hospital, and by poring over every hard-won photograph, the first of which I waited ten years to acquire after a request from a family member, or every scrap of a clue I could locate, all of this done in an effort to decode her illness, to rescue her finally.

In 2002, almost twenty years after her death, it occurred to me in the midst of my self-imposed seclusion that it was time to come out from Dorothy’s shadow, to release myself from the search to know who she was. It was time to truly emancipate, to search for Vicki, and to do so by turning my attention to the gifts I had been given, not only from Agatha Armstead, but from the many surrogate mothers, grandmothers, aunts, fosterers, mentors, grande dames, and sisters who were as much in my blood as was my own blood—the women who raised me.

It was time to tell their story—and mine.

part one

Grandmothers,

Mothers,

Aunts

(1959–1968)

I do but say what she is. So delicate with her needle: an admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention!

Othello

—william shakespeare

one

Bertha C. Taylor

What comes first, before conscious memory, before recorded images, and before the oral accounts that later helped me understand what happened during my first two and a half years of life, is a melody. It’s the sound of a lullaby sung by a woman who loves me infinitely, in a full voice that is untrained but on-key, perhaps with a frill here and there that she would never dare use at choir practice or in church, but allows herself just for me. The melody is accompanied in my primal senses by the sensation of motion, as I am held to her bosom and rocked.

Fittingly, my life begins with a dance—a waltz!

Out of this music and movement, other impressions remain of my first foster mother, Bertha Taylor, who received me from the Holy Innocents Home, the orphanage connected to Mercy Hospital in Portland, Maine. When I was three weeks old, Bertha took me to her home, fifteen miles away in the small town of Gray, Maine, with the absolute conviction that she would raise me to adulthood as her own. I know in my cells that this was her maternal plan, just as I know how generously and tenderly every day she kissed my forehead, the nape of my neck, and all my fingers and toes. I know that with her husband at her side and helping, too, she bathed me and changed my diapers for two and a half years, and that with her two best friends, Laura Sawyer and Retha Dunn, and their husbands, created a foundation of love and community that would live on in my self-esteem even when I couldn’t name its origin. I know that Bertha was my mother who bundled me up and took me outside as winter approached to introduce me to my first falling snow, the same mother who encouraged me to take my first steps.

Here in Gray, Maine, population 2,100 or so, approximately 99.9 percent Caucasian in the early 1960s, in the Taylor home on Greenleaf Street—formerly an old redbrick railroad station that Bertha converted into a ten-room residence—joy was born in my life. This imprinted happiness was a lasting gift that my first foster mother bestowed upon me.

What I also know, however, is that it was in this same place where I first heard a grown woman crying. That sound of anguish after a prolonged but failed effort to adopt me left a confusing shadow over my childhood—a dark mystery rooted not only in the circumstances of my birth, but in the very history of Maine.

Perched in the shape of a large ear, as if listening to the secrets of the vast Atlantic Ocean, situated at the most northeastern corner of the American Northeast, the state of Maine is not only the soil from which I sprang, but it ultimately represents my only legal parent. I was literally a daughter of Maine, influenced to an important degree by commonly held, decent values. Mainers on the whole are hardworking, down-to-earth people, devoted to family and community, austere, practical, faithful. Lives depend on survival of the elements and demand a respect for nature. Seasons mattered. We farmed, trapped, shoveled, tapped trees. Some fished, others cut timber and hunted, raised crops, milked cows, slopped pigs, and cleaned coops. We farmers took care of one another and what we had because life depended on it. We had long ago learned to recognize the consequences of failing to do so. We learned how to make things by hand and how to fix them when they were broken.

Of course, when I was growing up, there were noticeable regional and class differences. Northern or coastal Mainers, like members of the Collins family of Castine or lineages from places like Kennebunkport, Camden, and Booth Bay Harbor, tended to be wealthier, more educated, more connected to our nation’s founding families; the smaller rural or industrial towns of the south and interior—like Berwick, Gray, and West Lebanon—tended to be poorer and more working class, with lesser known but still long ago planted family names like Lord, Quimby, James, and Shapleigh of Lebanon, Maine. Ahead of their time, establishing early welfare in the United States, before and after the Civil War, these farmers bought and sold farms to aid the sick, the poor, and children, thus creating almsfarms (charity farms). Aside from other distinctions determined by social status, money, education level, and religious affiliation, differences were strong between the part-timers who summered in state and the year-round Mainers.