Reminiscences of Two Nonagenarians...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

I tore my house apart yesterday looking for a book written by my grandmother’s sister Louise, since it is the only place I know that verifies a story I heard about a Noyes uncle being struck by lightning (he wasn’t). Silas Noyes’ hay wagon was hit by lightning and caught on fire, frightening the horses, who bolted and threw him off the wagon, killing him.

There was a lot of that sort of thing happening in those days.

The book was not shelved with my non-fiction, though it is, in a way, a history book. It was not with memoirs, though it is filled with memories. It was not with fiction, though there are some flights of fancy. Not architecture, not farming. I clearly need a better library organization system.

In the end, with stacks of excavated books teetering dangerously all over the house, I found the book, lined up neatly with cookbooks. Sometimes I try to figure out what I was thinking, and I despair.

The book is a richly illustrated 131-page spiral-bound masterpiece in some terrible mid-90s font. It is entitled Memoirs of Louise Curtis (Poore) Muzrall, Fall 2009 (note to self: shelve with memoirs, you dolt). Aunt Louise, born in 1918, was 91 when she wrote it, so don’t tell me you can’t write a book.

Aunt Louise was one of the ones who got away (from West Newbury). She married her brother-in-law, Arthur Muzrall, in 1942, and they moved to Norwell, where she lived for the rest of her very long life. I remember her as a veiled threat when I was a very young child living in Canada reluctantly writing thank-you cards. Aunt Louise had been a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, I was told. Your printing had better be magnificent. Later, when she would come back to the house in West Newbury to visit her sisters, she was joyful and kind, always laughing with Aunt Emily, her best friend and little sister.

Perhaps it was because she went away that the house in West Newbury, and her early life there, took on such importance to Aunt Louise. She spent much of her retirement working on our family genealogy with her niece, Sue Follansbee, and then, in her 90s, as her siblings passed away one by one, she sat down with Aunt Emily and Cousin Sue and wrote down everything she remembered from what she calls “way back when.”

In Newburyport, Sarah (Smith) Emery was also in her 90s when she told her stories of “Ye Olden Time” to her daughter, Sarah Anna Emery, who collected them as Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian. She died in 1879, age 92, the same year the book was published.

Louise Curtis Poore and Sarah (Smith) Emery were born 131 years and less than four miles apart. Emery was born on Crane Neck Street in West Newbury in a cluster of houses owned by the Smith and Little families.

Aunt Louise was born on Garden Street in a cluster of houses owned by the Poore family.

Aunt Louise and Sarah (Smith) Emery are first cousins, thrice removed. Both women were moved to tell stories of a world they knew was dying.

Think of it – pull the thread that thrums between these two women and you are zipped right back to just after the American Revolution. Except, of course, many of you have read Emery, but none of you, I wager, have read Aunt Louise.

It is remarkable to me how many things remain unchanged, over a century apart, in the memories of these West Newbury women.

From Aunt Louise, “When it was dry, (my father) used the hay rake to gather the hay into windrows. He and my brothers hitched up both horses to the big hay wagon. One would stay in the wagon and spread the hay that the others would pitch up…this was hot and sweaty work. If it looked like rain, the hay was pitched into haycocks. Once in a while, Emily and I would fill a tin pail in which we added cream of tartar and sugar. This we took to the hay workers.”

From Emery: “The last load pitched in the hay mow and the last haycock turned up, my father and the hired man joined us in the cool back room where bowls of milk and bread were ready for those who wished the refreshment.”

Emery: “Dinner was on the table punctually at twelve o’clock. In the hot weather we usually had boiled salted meat and vegetables…and a custard or pudding.”

Aunt Louise: “Our main meal was always at noontime. We called this meal dinner, usually potatoes and some vegetables…sometimes chicken. We usually had dessert though.”

Aunt Louise: “Each fall my father banked the house. He piled dirt all around the base of the house to keep as much cold out as possible.”

Emery: “The house was banked up; everything without and within made tight and trim to defy as much as possible the approach of old Boreas.”

They both had measles, not unusual in the days before vaccines, both gathered eggs and drank water from a dipper in a pail and rode in a sleigh to church on Sunday. Both recalled with great fondness their relationships with relatives who connected them even further back in time.

There is something about re-reading these memoirs that made me feel a bit melancholy here at the start of this new year. Something about how the world of Aunt Louise’s childhood had changed so little for so long, but we have accelerated the pace of change to the point where it seems impossible to keep up.

No, that’s not it, or that’s not the heart of it, anyway. I’m struck by how, over the last two years, we have made decades of increasing ageism a point of national pride. We have shrugged off pandemic deaths when they happen to older people, as if those lives are expendable, as if vulnerable people are less worthy of care, not more. We have written miles of copy about young victims and consigned the richness of a long life to a statistic.

Aunt Louise lived to 99, dying in 2017. Aunt Emily died at 96. They connect us to nearly two centuries of history and experience.

Sarah Anna Emery, just by listening to her older relatives and writing down what they remembered, connects us to the 18th century and before. The world, or at least this corner of it, is an infinitely richer place because of them. It’s not all butter-churning and halcyon summer days, either. Louise lost her mother when she was fifteen, and so her memories are tinged with grief. But she ends her book with an exhortation that I hereby pass on to you in this new year.

“Thus ends this account of my memories…mistakes and all. Now go and make notes for your book.”