The Maine town where my mother was born, and where I was born, had become a small grey community of little importance by the time of her childhood, although it had been significant in the early settlement of the state. The earliest settlers, explorers from Plymouth colony, had recognized the importance of the wide deep river, the Kennebec, and the earliest buildings were clustered along its bank. This became Water Street, named because the rver, wide and deep enough to accommodate ships, flooded regularly when the ice broke up in spring. High water marks, and the dates of the worst floods, were engraved in granite cornerstones set high into the corners of the commercial buildings; once the town built a bridge, but it lasted only nine years before it was demolished by ice during an early thaw.

In the early history of the town, ice companies had cut and stored and shipped the river ice to the southern states, and even to the West Indies, in vessels made by local shipbuilders. There had also been granite quarries that shipped granite downriver and all over the world; that industry , which brought to the town as stonemasons the Italian families which still live there, collapsed at the end of the 1920s. The town's cotton mill went bankrupt during the Civil War, the sandpaper factory folded, the shipbuilding industry collapsed with the advent of the railroad; the last remaining industry,the ladies' shoe factory, lasted until the early 1960s, and the building, where my mother's mother worked at one point in her life, was renovated into senior citizen apartments, where she lived just before she died.

My mother's birth year, 1928, was the year before the collapse of the stock market, before the Great Depression that lasted the first ten years of my mother's life. I do not know how the Depression affected her childhood, how well the small farms that made up most of the town at that time insulated the community from the worst of the disasters, what jobs were lost, what families suffered irreparable losses. When I was a child the town seemed shabby and disinterested, especially along Water Street where the most destitute families lived in the flood plain and around the foul-smelling shoe factory. There was one hotel and restaurant, a diner, three or four convenience stores, a Woolworth's, a pizza place, one grocery store, a bowling alley, a bank--the movie theatre closed when I was in elementary school. And there were six churches: Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Universalist, Episcopalian and Roman Catholic; during my mother's childhood the Universalist Church closed and was converted to an American Legion meeting hall. Now the town's biggest livelihood comes from the antique shops that line Water Street, and most commercial activity takes place in the State capital, a few miles away, or in the two shopping malls.

I do know that poverty was respectable and ordinary in my mother's childhood, as were long cold winters with snow that piled up to the eaves of houses and spring floods, and the occasional hurricane. People heated with wood, later coal; in fall people banked their houses around the foundations with planks and sawdust or pine boughs, heated with wood, bathed in the kitchen in the same washtubs in which they laundered their clothes--children once a week, adults less often. Her mother's family was French Canadian, but after a time they did not speak French at home; it would not have been good to be different. Neither were Catholics particularly respected in the predominantly Protestant town. Her father's family was English, a line of descent that someone traced back to the second voyage of the Mayflower. That side of the family had a name, and respectability, but as far as I know little else.

I also know that being a girl, and then a woman, in the time when my mother was growing up, was not easy. The town was surrounded by farms, where many people still had outhouses instead of indoor plumbing. The houses were mostly uninsulated, heated with kerosene space heaters, wood-burning furnaces, then coal; my mother sometimes recollected the grime that all three heating methods produced, and how hard it was to keep children clean when water had to be heated on the stove and some houses didn't have bathtubs. She told me stories, when I was in high school, about her own high school years, when during the war there was a rubber shortage and girls' bras would stretch out beyond repair, and their underpants had to be pinned up with safety pins; she saw the welcome beginning of the sanitary supply industry, and hinted at how difficult it had been when women used rags, instead of sanitary napkins, and boiled them on the stove to clean them.

My oldest brothers and I were born in the modern era, in the hospital, where women were advised to bottle-feed and nipples and bottles were sterilized on the stove. Doctors recommended that babies be fed on a regular schedule and not on demand, but my mother hated this and stopped doing it as soon as she left the hospital with each of us. She described for me the silk stitches the doctor used after her first few births, which shrank and pulled; young mothers were confined to bed for several days and were not allowed to have bowel movements until these stitches could be removed. My mother found this impossible.

She said the invention of the electric stove seemed a Godsend after the gas ranges that sometimes exploded in flames. She grew up ironing with a flatiron that had to be heated on the stove, and learned to sew on a treadle machine before her mother bought the belt-drive electric Singer we still had when I lived at home. She did laundry with a washboard and hung it on the line, even in winter, when the sheets froze into flat boards that had to be thawed and warmed in front of the stove, and even the wringer washer she rolled out of its corner and drained in the kitchen sink seemed like a miracle, although it popped the buttons off shirts and sometimes caught her fingers in the rollers. The pop-up toaster, the blender, the steam iron, the transistor radio, and eventually the toaster-oven, the electric popcorn maker, the automatic washer and dryer, the gas furnace, all came along when her children were still young and revolutionized her life. And then there was television, the magical babysitter that kept us out of her hair and taught us all to want things, to slick our hair back or let it grow long, into our eyes, to smoke cigarettes with careless gestures, to fear the Russians, to be ashamed of our differences. My mother knew the absence of all this; she survived the cataclysmic advent of the modern.

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To other parts of "Archaeology of a Mother": 1-- 3-- 4-- 5