To Be a New England "Girl"

My mother, managing five children and the social commitments that went with my father's management job, rarely spent money on herself (if we don't count those cigarettes). But she indulged in two magazine subscriptions that meant the world to her: Yankee Magazine, and Down East, "The Magazine of Maine." When a copy of one of those arrived in the mail, she'd curl up in her armchair under the portrait of her four-greats grandmother, and reconnect with the New England self she'd left behind in 1950 when she married my dad and moved with him to that land of plentiful engineering jobs: New Jersey.

Each summer she'd craft lengthy lists of meal plans and clothing needed, and we'd all head to New England for family camping. Our visits to great-aunts and various sorts of cousins dwindled with time, as either they passed away or the chaos of a large family couldn't be welcomed. So my memories of "Auntie Mi" (my grandfather Palmer's sister) and her husband are very faint indeed. I recall a donkey and maybe a pony at their New Hampshire home. And one of the more distant cousins, also called Aunt out of respect for her age, made doughnuts in Vermont. I don't know which town, now.

My folks had a challenging marriage, but around 1980 Dad went to a "gestalt" psychological workshop in Florida and came home repentant, determined to start over. They put their house on the market, quickly accepted an offer, and were weeks away from moving to Mexico City, where Dad would manage a lighting factory in transition, when Mom dropped to the ground outside the nursing home where she worked, and in a shockingly short time, she died.

In between the fresh start and the devastating ending, Mom sold or gave away most of her family treasures that spoke of New England. "You kids aren't interested in the stuff," she said firmly.

I can't say for sure about my siblings, but I was already in Vermont, rebuilding the family connection to New England, parenting a toddler, and expecting a second child. By the time I knew what Mom was up to, she'd done it. 

Then three years later my home burned to the cellarhole, in one of those devastating Vermont winter fires where there's nothing left—except in this case me and my children, which of course meant the most important part survived and went forward. (Yes, this is part of why my novels often include a fire.)

Somehow, these many years later, I do have a few small items from Mom's New England life. That probably means my father held onto them and passed them to me after the house fire. Two of them, small and without family initials, remain tiny treasures to me ... and those are what I carried to the Concord Historical Society last year, when I suddenly needed cover images for my newest novel, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET (Winds of Freedom Book 3). Concord's Beth Quimby kindly opened the museum to me, so I could stage a few photographs.

This one didn't get chosen for the cover, but it includes the two small items that remind me of Mom's New England roots: a locket that now holds a bit of my late husband's hair in its specially made interior, and a tiny mirror, far smaller than the one that always rested on my mother's "dressing table" next to her rose-scented eau de toilette and her face powder.

Somehow it seems like I should look into getting my own subscriptions again to those two classic New England magazines that engaged my mother so deeply. The story keeps spiraling, though: My first published poem in a national magazine? Yes, it was in Yankee Magazine, in 1995 -- too late for Mom to see it, but confirming for me anyway that I was becoming the New England "girl" she had always been at heart.