before-part II.

My mother hailed from the village of Canterbury,in the province of New Brunswick,not far from where it borders on the state of Maine.The whole of that area is well treed and the main industry relates to the harvest of those trees,on both sides of that border.The towns on one side are not very different from towns on the other.

Canterbury was a thriving little village ,once, with a busy downtown.It's main street was the same as the highway that passed through it and all of it's stores and most of it's better houses were located along Main Street.There were a few cross streets that led up into the surrounding woods and generally the houses and people became less prosperous the farther you ventured from Main Street.Canterbury bore very little resemblance,as near as I can tell to the town after which it was named.

My mother's home was in the land past Canterbury.It was rough country,the land hilly and rocky,the soil thin and with trees all about.It was not so well suited to farming,but they lived on what they called a farm just the same.You could raise a few animals and enough food to subsist,but I believe them to have been poor as well.That's the story one look at the land would tell you.

Like my father,my mother was born in winter.She never spoke much of the event,so I don't know if she was born at home or at the place of a midwife.But it seems unlikely she was born in a hospital,as Canterbury has never in my memory had a hospital.

The thing that she did speak about happened about two months later,in May which was hot and dry.A wildfire swept through their community,and their house was burned to the ground.I've heard it said that a certain man is credited with rescuing my mother from the house,but others say she was never really in much danger.According to her,my grandfather walked away from the fire with nothing but the clothes on his back and a ten dollar bill in his pocket.Still he rebuilt there,it became my mothers home,and my grand parents lived there until well into the 1960's.

Life must have been hard for my mother,as they would have been living off the land,off of what they could grow,and the timber which my grandfather cut.I've heard her make reference to going to school in a horse drawn sleigh,and of not being able to get there once because of a snowfall that made the road impassable for the horses.Still my mother went to school and graduated from the high school in town in 1950.She must have been quite clever to have completed her schooling in just ten years.

My mother left Canterbury after her schooling,becoming,along with my father,the first in my family to be "From Away." In those days that term had a slightly different meaning.It could have referred to someone who moved to the next town,or a bit farther off.But it didn't always mean someone who left the region or even the province.

My mother was a short little woman,a stoic,which,if you had ever seen the land she grew up in would have made perfect sense.She came a long way from that home,but she belonged to it without any doubt.Her whole outlook on life emanated from that rough little farm in the New Brunswick backwoods.