Keep elders close. Capture stories before they fade.

My grandmother was born on Grand Manning Island just off the coast of Maine. You can sail to Eastport by going past the Quoddy Head Lighthouse through a channel between Lubec and Campobello Island into the Bay of Fundy. This bay has one of the highest tides in the world — forty feet or more. My grandmother's maiden name was Mable Tall, most likely of English or Irish descent. I do not know if she had any brothers or sisters. I know she had her mother living with her while she brought up her children. My mother's father passed away when she was young. I remember the house that my grandmother lived in, a small Cape-like house but not a true Cape Cod style. The street was paved with clam shells — crushed and rolled down into the street to form a hard surface, pure white and clean-looking. Years later I went back to see the house on Hawks Avenue and the clam shells were replaced with blacktop, ugly and dirty-looking. I remember the kitchen, the trapdoor, the cold storage room in the cellar: milk, eggs, meat when there was any, and the yeast crock. Granny put potatoes, water, and God knows what else to ferment until it turned into yeast. I used to sneak down and drink the yeast water. I have no idea why. Seaweed doused and fried in butter. Lobster sneaked into the house — people didn't eat lobster, only the very poor and the hired help. In some towns there was a law that said you could feed lobster to your help only two times a week. The poor help! Codfish and pork scrap gravy on boiled potatoes. I loved this so-called “poor” eating — it would most likely kill me now. I remember the general store in downtown Eastport: the smell of oakum used to caulk the seams of wooden boats and ships. This had a tar smell that filled the store and everything in it. The store sold everything you could think of: ship fittings to boat cloth, pots, pans, candy — you name it, they had it. One day the store caught on fire and burned a small part of it, then they had a fire sale. I bought a toy sailboat. I loved it for a few years; it still smelled like oakum all the time I had it. My grandmother's next-door neighbors were Frank Beal and his wife. I do not remember her first name. Frank was also a sea captain. His house was much larger than my grandmother's. It was yellow and had a barn. A row of hollyhocks planted every spring separated the two properties. My grandmother used to split the bulbs and tie them together to make multiple colors — yellow, red, blue, orange, and so forth. It sounds weird but it worked. You might have as many as four colors on one stalk. They grew as much as six feet tall and made a very fine hedge between the two properties.