This year marks the 150th anniversary of our old schoolhouse. As part of the celebration, a lobster bake was held at the schoolhouse on Saturday, August 15. The weather was sunny and everyone had a great time. Click here for the story and photos!

"What is this place that it should bear
so salty-sweet a name --and fair?"

This is dear Pretty Marsh where I roamed barefoot as a child and knew every nook and cranny of the fields and woods. I found the early violets and ladies slippers by a cool spring hidden under the trees. I discovered Indian pipes growing in a mossy glen near the falls. I was afraid they were supernatural.

My brother, George, and I were allowed to go fishing off the bluffs in the cove. It was a high precipice to me and I didn't dare look over the edge. But, with the years, the bluffs seems quite normal. How well I remember the day he caught an eel and little sister was made to hold it while he tried to catch another! It squirmed and it wriggled away in the dirt and leaves. I had to find it and hold on some more! When we finally carried it home and it was cleaned and in the frying pan, each piece jumped - reflex action I'm told -- anyway, I have never cared for eels.

When my mother was a child she remembers that lump fish were caught in the cove. They had a pink meat and were delicious but lumpfish are not in my memory, tho' I did catch hundreds of flounders (and sculpins!) outside the cove over the mussel bed beyond the falls. Many a time I caught twenty five or more in a morning and brought them back and cleaned them on a rock by the shore and then distributed them to the neighbors, some of whom didn't like flounders. I found out later they called them "mud fish".

Sometimes I took a five quart pail along on my morning fishing jaunt and brought it back full of blackberries, picked at the end of the point across the cove (Johnson's house there now). I was always gathering something--if it wasn't blackberries, it was raspberries, or blueberries, or crabapples, or wild choke cherries (they make delicious jelly!), or cranberries, or clams or goose grass--do you know about goose grass? It's tender, salty grass that grows along the shore at high water mark. The older people cooked it as a green with salt pork and ate it with vinegar, but mother simmered it slowly in salted water until tender, drained and chopped it and added butter, pepper and salt.

As I walked through the woods, I ate bunchberries, "two-eyed plums" (partridge berries), upland cranberries, wild pears, chewed spruce gum, spearmint and slippery elm bark and gathered catnip for my cat. Sometimes I would lie down on the moss and look up through the trees and feel how good it was to be right there. I hope my children have had this feeling and that someday my grandchildren and great-great? will also know it too. Dear Pretty Marsh.

My brother was a quiet boy -- and a boys' boy. His head was either in a book or he was roaming the woods with his rifle and bringing home rabbits or partridge for mother to cook -- to my utter dislike and dismay. Once he was punished for running away and sent to his room for the afternoon. He went out the window, walked around the gutter and was off to play, returning the same route and was in his room when Mother came to let him out.

I remember the first bird he shot. He had aimed at it with his new air rifle, not expecting to hit it. When it fell dead he was in tears and I was enlisted to help prepare a coffin. The robin was buried with real ceremony and two mourners.

Father was a sea captain, and my memories of his visits home are very fleeting. By record and chart he had been around the world three times. Sometimes he had an interest in the vessels he sailed but more often he was hired as a Sailing Master to take a cargo ship. I have many of his old log books. A romantic era that passed at the turn of the century -- Romantic? Man against the fury of storms at sea. When the crew were terrified and refused to go aloft to reef the sails, the Captain went alone and ropes snapped off two of his fingers. At 42 during a mutiny at sea he and his 1st mate were knifed in the back and their bodies thrown overboard. That was Oct. 10, 1905. The ignorant crew had thought to get the ship to shore and collect for the cargo.

It so happened that a friend of Fathers (Capt. Taylor) sighted the ship in distress and boarded it and put the ringleaders in irons and brought the ship to port in Norfolk, Va. Mother told of having a nightmare about the time this happened. She saw commotion on deck and knew that something had happened to Father. She lived with this fear for several days and when she saw my uncle coming up the driveway one day, she knew he brought bad news.

Those were grim days. I was seven and my brother ten. Mother was bereft. She sat by the window with her head in her hands or aimlessly tried to move about the house and do for us children. Kind neighbors, the Warners, who lived across the field (the old Pray house), Grandfather and Aunt Lin did all they could. Dear Mother, she picked up the pieces and carried on, like the good, noble spirit she was. The house she owned and that was her security but there was very little in the bank. I think from the moment she got her courage back, her one aim in life was to be due her children get an education; she didn't know how she could swing it--but she was determined and her sights were set.