Young Nora, Young Gordon

To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

Elie Wiesel

Young Nora and Gordon are both seen here in skirts. He was the oldest of five children, Gordon, Abbie, Ruth, George, Sam. Nora had a full brother Paul, and half brother, Max. Nora lost her mother three days after Paul was born, at age two. You can see her faintly, outside the house on the left, hiding behind her maternal grandmother's skirts. Gordon's mother died in 1910, when he was 21.

Nora graduated from Washington Academy , an East Machias independent high school. She lived/boarded? somewhere in Machiasport and fell upon the fairly prosperous Hanson Clan.

Nursed and nurtured by the sounds and smells of the sea, the two were somehow acquainted and courted. Nora became the salt of his earth, and he her cure for loneliness. I, their only granddaughter, literally walk in their footsteps, here in their last home.

For the Record,
This day came in sunny and dry. We are 9 inches shy of the usual rain levels recorded by springtime and the fire danger is mounting.