My grandparents were Thomas Graham and Alta Graham(Smith).The back country of Western New Brunswick,very remote territory in those days was home to them.Even today,long after their passing,it is a long way from the main road,and most people would never venture there.It's still deeply dark in the night,it's roads are still dusty,muddy or icy by season.There are still few people living out there,still a lot of abandoned farms.The world passes by and gives hardly a though to that country.
Thomas Graham was a farmer and a lumberman.By the time I was able to form meaningful memories of him,he was quite old,and always seemed frail.He was functionally deaf without his hearing aid,and,I believe, sometimes used that device to retreat a few steps from the world,simply by turning it down or off.He had no discernible chin either.His face,a narrow face just seemed to merge with a narrow body.Both that deformity and the deafness are said to have resulted from a battle with scarlet fever when he was a small child. Yet he must have been sturdy in his day.He was ax handle thin and of about average height.Wiry is a word often used to describe such men,slim but well muscled once,with prominent veins running like rivers in his arms.It's hard to picture him standing up to a tall tree,felling it,then dragging it away and selling it,perhaps even riding down the river on huge masses of such logs.but he must have been reasonably proficient at it.Even after they retired,and moved to town,his shed contained all of the tools of that trade.
Alta Graham was physically everything that her husband was not.She was short and plump,generously proportioned both in bosom and hips,and she always swayed some,from side to side when she walked,like a sturdy mule.As long as I knew her she was a healthy and sturdy woman,and must have taken well to farm life,and been competent in its chores and able to withstand it's hardships with little complaint.She gave birth to both sons and daughters,and her son bore a greater resemblance to her husband,while her daughters favored her,being shorter and more stoutly built.She had long ,thick hair,always worn in a bun,a round,moon like face,with equally moonish brown eyes, a rather broad flat nose and just the hint of a a double chin.A lot of dimples and a mole.It's hard to say if she were ever considered attractive,but she was a quiet and gentle soul,though possessed of a hyper kinetic energy well up into her later years,and an ardent curiosity about the world immediately around her.She professed to have little interest of other,far away places,though I believe her thoughts extended well beyond just the world at her feet.
By 1965,both of my grandparents were advanced in years.My grandmother,in fact had been born in 1900,and while sixty five years does not seem overly old today,it was considered to be elderly at the time,more so than today.My grandfather was considerably older than that,and so,they moved away from the farm,as many people were doing.Their move was only about seven miles or so from the old home place,but it was still a move into town,to a different way of life.
I don't recall the exact year that they moved,but it must have been about 1965,after we'd been in Moncton a year or a bit more.At first they lived in a cinder block building right downtown,at the foot of the first hill.There was a store in the front of that building,which was long and narrow,and there were apartments,or rooms in the rear.My Uncle Clifford lived in that building too at the time.That was at a time when Canterbury still had a thriving downtown,a mill and a train that passed through every morning.
Later,perhaps just a few months later, they moved into a white house up on Orchard Street,the second left as you head up the hill leaving downtown.They lived about two thirds of the way to where Orchard Street ended in a dead end,and the houses beyond their own became progressively smaller and less prosperous.And when they moved,my grandfather dragged something of the obsolescence of the forgotten countryside with him,in the form of some old farm implements,and almost certainly every license plate that had ever been on any car he'd owned.Those were nailed to the side wall of one of his two unpainted sheds.His car,a 1953 Bel Air was old in comparison to those of most of his neighbors,and had been hand painted a dark blue with a paintbrush.Some of his neighbors up the street had brought even older relics with them,and a few yards into the woods at the end of the road,there were sometimes pigs wandering about.
Thomas Graham was a farmer and a lumberman.By the time I was able to form meaningful memories of him,he was quite old,and always seemed frail.He was functionally deaf without his hearing aid,and,I believe, sometimes used that device to retreat a few steps from the world,simply by turning it down or off.He had no discernible chin either.His face,a narrow face just seemed to merge with a narrow body.Both that deformity and the deafness are said to have resulted from a battle with scarlet fever when he was a small child. Yet he must have been sturdy in his day.He was ax handle thin and of about average height.Wiry is a word often used to describe such men,slim but well muscled once,with prominent veins running like rivers in his arms.It's hard to picture him standing up to a tall tree,felling it,then dragging it away and selling it,perhaps even riding down the river on huge masses of such logs.but he must have been reasonably proficient at it.Even after they retired,and moved to town,his shed contained all of the tools of that trade.
Alta Graham was physically everything that her husband was not.She was short and plump,generously proportioned both in bosom and hips,and she always swayed some,from side to side when she walked,like a sturdy mule.As long as I knew her she was a healthy and sturdy woman,and must have taken well to farm life,and been competent in its chores and able to withstand it's hardships with little complaint.She gave birth to both sons and daughters,and her son bore a greater resemblance to her husband,while her daughters favored her,being shorter and more stoutly built.She had long ,thick hair,always worn in a bun,a round,moon like face,with equally moonish brown eyes, a rather broad flat nose and just the hint of a a double chin.A lot of dimples and a mole.It's hard to say if she were ever considered attractive,but she was a quiet and gentle soul,though possessed of a hyper kinetic energy well up into her later years,and an ardent curiosity about the world immediately around her.She professed to have little interest of other,far away places,though I believe her thoughts extended well beyond just the world at her feet.
By 1965,both of my grandparents were advanced in years.My grandmother,in fact had been born in 1900,and while sixty five years does not seem overly old today,it was considered to be elderly at the time,more so than today.My grandfather was considerably older than that,and so,they moved away from the farm,as many people were doing.Their move was only about seven miles or so from the old home place,but it was still a move into town,to a different way of life.
I don't recall the exact year that they moved,but it must have been about 1965,after we'd been in Moncton a year or a bit more.At first they lived in a cinder block building right downtown,at the foot of the first hill.There was a store in the front of that building,which was long and narrow,and there were apartments,or rooms in the rear.My Uncle Clifford lived in that building too at the time.That was at a time when Canterbury still had a thriving downtown,a mill and a train that passed through every morning.
Later,perhaps just a few months later, they moved into a white house up on Orchard Street,the second left as you head up the hill leaving downtown.They lived about two thirds of the way to where Orchard Street ended in a dead end,and the houses beyond their own became progressively smaller and less prosperous.And when they moved,my grandfather dragged something of the obsolescence of the forgotten countryside with him,in the form of some old farm implements,and almost certainly every license plate that had ever been on any car he'd owned.Those were nailed to the side wall of one of his two unpainted sheds.His car,a 1953 Bel Air was old in comparison to those of most of his neighbors,and had been hand painted a dark blue with a paintbrush.Some of his neighbors up the street had brought even older relics with them,and a few yards into the woods at the end of the road,there were sometimes pigs wandering about.
No comments:
Post a Comment