Today my Grandmother Nora was born.

Nora was born in Lubec, Maine in 1893 and left us at 96 in 1989. She was so loved by me, our family and scores of my friends who thought of her as their Gramma too. 

She had a coastal Maine childhood, digging clams, working in sardine factories as a teen, but with significant loss at a young age. Her mother died after delivering her brother Paul when she was just two.  In those days it was not thought possible for a widower to bring up children alone. So, Nora and her brother were then placed under the care of her maternal grandparents just a few house down the South Lubec Road. That's the road that ends in the famous Lubec red and white striped, West Quoddy Lighthouse. Her grandfather and great grandfather had worked there as Light Keepers. 

She graduated from Washington Academy, a small private high school in East Machias, Maine, still open now. Her family moved to Machiasport so she could attend, and lived on the hill just above her future husband, my grandfather.  She walked to the Academy and back, just about 4 miles each way. Her graduating class had a fabulous class trip to Washington D.C by train and steamboat. I have the photographs and a beautiful bottle of smelling salts she bought at South Station in Boston.

She attended Grays Portland Business College, in Portland, Maine and became the stenographer for the New England Manager of the Waltham Watch Company. She was courted by my seagoing grandfather and they married in June of 1920. He soon earned his Captain's license after working as a surfman at a Life Saving Station and Quartermast on a Lighthouse Tender on the coast of Maine.

They welcomed my mother in December 1921, and lived in various apartments in Cambridge and the surrounding towns. My grandfather was Captain of a coastal coal hauling steamship. In 1928, with the help of a sailor who had a car and a license( they never drove our owed a car) they selected and purchased the house T and I live in, with 15 acres of wooded land. Land that now houses my brother's family and my niece's family. I grew up next door in a house my brother and I sold upon the death of my mother.

Nora was one of the most influential people in my life. She knew and shared so much of her knowledge of flowers, bulbs, birds and beasties. I spent so much of my childhood with her. I was enchanted by our shared conversations and the books she would read me as I sat in her lap or beside her chair. She loved cats.

I lived with her after I returned from teaching in Maine and she had so much of fun entertaining my friends. She endlessly knitted wool afghans and did needle point in her later years, As a 'girl' as she would say, she did 'fine work', she called it hemstitching, linen towels with embroidered monograms and decorative scolloped edges. She loved flowers and most of all, bulbs. I'm smiling as I think of how happy she would be to see the clumps of Poet's Narcissus she loved now in bloom.

I could go on and on, but I loved her, miss her and am totally thankful for her. I had to make this collage.

In the extras, a diary series I did, "Nora at Revere Beach", "Pickles for a Treat", and "Lobster night."

For the Record,
This day came in sunny and cool with gathering clouds. I painted with my Zoom pals .

All hands relieved that T feels fine today after her second shot.