Great Aunt Glady's House

This is a half Cape, I've heard the story a hundred times how these houses were considered sadhouses. Because there were no children, there was no need to add on the other half of the house. Aunt Gladys had no children but she was a wonderful surrogate mother for my mom, whose mother died quite young. Aunt Gladys made a point of buying dolls and things for mom to make her happy as a child. My mother in turn oversaw Aunt Glady's care when she was in her 80's and wanted to stay in her house. Mom would cook for her and visit.

I loved Aunt Gladys, she let me use her summer living room off the garage for pajama parties. Uncle Frank used to smoke cigars and watch TV out there. When Mom inherited the house I used the back room for my art studio summer and winter. It was filled with hand painted French Provincial furniture she bought at a New York gallery auction. That furniture was shipped to California and used by Emma in her apartment for four years while in college. Two years ago it was shipped back to Duxbury and is in 408 Bay Rd cottage.

Aunt Gladys claimed her secret to longevity was not mixing her scotch with any sweet mixes. She lived to be 96yrs and is the reason I said I drank scotch when asked in college. She later denied she ever told me to wait until 5pm to have a cocktail. Aunt Gladys met her husband, Uncle Frank, in World War I in Paris where she was an US Army nurse.

Surplus Street is a great street to walk on, except for the occasional dog it is quiet and there are not many cars. My family's homestead is just across the street from Aunt Glady's, it is one of the first land grants from Plymouth Colony. Aunt Gladys grew up at the farm with her eleven siblings.

Grandpa Walter & Joyce's House

I used to ride my bike past my grandfather's house with Pam wondering if he belonged to the Yacht Club so I could go to the dances she went to; he didn't. Once George and I stayed there when Mom's house had too many visitors to overnight for the holidays.
The house used to be an old store and Joyce's uncle next door gave it to her when she came over with her four children to avoid the War in England where her husband was a British bomber pilot. He died after the war in the Pacific at age 40yrs on his way to a conference in Australia. His youngest son, Bob, would die in the same ocean at the same age off the coast of the big island while on the Holoholo ship that the University of Hawaii hired for their oceanographic trips.
Joyce liked my first husband Bob alot, and she used to make old fashions for us to drink in the living room at cocktail hour. She told us stories about her father being an Oxford donne and her making a foe par about the black hole of Calcutta when she spoke to one of his students. Joyce went to Mount Holyoke as did her daughters; Walter went to Dartmouth where he met my grandmother Cindy who was a nursing student. Cindy had daddy and Walter got a silver trophy for having the first grandchild of the class of '29. Now I have the trophy, it's hidden somewhere in a drawer as it is sterling silver.
My grandfather didn't talk much to me; I wondered if he even knew who I was. After dinner at his house, he congratulated me on my nomination to the National Honor Society. He said he knew how hard it was for our side of the family to measure up to his second wife, Joyce's family.
He used to bribe me to stop smoking but that didn't work. I stopped when I was much older and diagnosed with bladder cancer.Pam and I were in a car outside of the old brick Duxbury High school when someone offered me a cigarette. That was one of the worst choices I made in my life. Smoking that cigarette in the car in the parking lot at age 14yrs.

The Camp/Bloody Pond

This is the summer house my great grandfather John built three miles from his winter home on Long Pond and left it for my grandmother and her two children upon his death. My grandmother, Ella would leave at the first sounds of the peepers in Spring and head for the Camp in Plymouth,Ma..Our family still goes there for the summer vacations we eek out of our business lives far away from the town.
As kids, we spent the summers there with my grandmother and our Uncle Larry and Aunt Vera and their seven kids in the next house at Oaks in the PInes. Riding bikes or walking Ship Pond dirt road to pick a few pints of blueberries without spilling them at the shot of the scarecrow's gun was difficult. I think we made 24 cents a pint from that company.
We played cards(war and poker), we swam, canoed,sunbathed, picniced and chased the call of birds(mocking birds) in the pine grove for three months a year. I tried to dig a hole to China once. When Hap saw me he gave me some advice; get an education he said, no one can take that away from you. Love doesn't last he said.No words of wisdom about the hole, or I guess that was his suggestion too.
My cousin Morton lives in the camp now during the winter and leaves only when we take over and stay there with my sister Donna who now owns the place. He moves to one of the campers at his place which is an acre owned by his late father Uncle Larry. Morton is a bog man like his great grandfather John, except he doesn't own the land the bogs are on which is how the bog men got rich.

Back to Hawaii; Waipahu

I transferred back to Honolulu with United, after five years of working and going to school in New York and New Jersey. Now, engaged to Kuhia, and moved to his family home living in the servant's quarters until my house in Kalihi was vacated by my tenants. The traffic was horrific into Honolulu at six am. Sugar cane mill still smelled of sweet smog from it's smoke stack nearby and turned the houses in the neighborhood sort of a rust color. The locals called this the "country", I couldn't see anything but people and houses.
Kuhia called me to say someone had broken into his house and stolen my jewelry, I was devastated. The small box I hid very carefully was found, they dared come into the house of a big, brawling, local Hawaiian. Pearl city police located my engagement ring which I bought back from Kamaina Jewelers. My niece's boyfriend was responsible; in exchange for not prosecuting him I got back my grandfather's fraternity pin, and the aquamarine and diamond ring from great aunt gladys. Silver and gold charm bracelets along with pins, rings gone forever; all my cherished memories. I couldn't wait to get out of there, maybe that was the real plan of the relatives, they wanted the house.
Went to a neighborhood party and saw a man's face smashed with a beer bottle because of a disputed Payut card game. Home alone to stuff toilet paper in my ears while the Philippinos next door bled a pig. OMG! I shut all the louver windows, kept running around the inside of the house thinking I was somehow in Hell now. Kuhia's Weimaraner was chained to the front lanai with his dish and all he was stolen; heart breaking.

Yorktown Heights New York

There aren't many people who drove from New York 45miles on ice and snow to their job across the Tappan Zee Bridge into New Jersey. It's usually the other way around. I loved Westchester county and the 14 roomed two hundred year old Colonial house George lived in.I also fell in love with his daughter, Johanna
George and I were both going through divorces and we liked the same things. It was hard to weather the two year battle he had in court for shared custody of his daughter. We spent a lot of time in the big drafty kitchen freezing next to the smokey old, leaking wood stove. So much for the fourteen rooms, we stayed in one room most of the year on the "economy plan" of the local oil company who charged $400./mth all year for no heat.
We also spent time at his mother Dorothy's house in Pawling, NY..I brought some slides in to develop and the clerk asked me if we were fixing the place up and I had to say, no. My art studio had bats behind the pictures hanging on the wall so I moved very cautiously in there. George told me how he and his sister Susan used to catch the bats with sheets as a game; one I never wanted to try.
We would go on long walks in the 275 acre "farm"squeezed to darkness by overgrown trees. Once walked the property line with James Earl Jones who had build a brick mansion surrounded by Dobermans on George's land according to the survey he had done with 84yrs old Dorothy. I heard George say looking at the deeded land Jones had I think there is a property like that three miles down the road. Went back to Hawaii before that was resolved.
Left Johanna my tv with a lipstick message, "I love you." And I did, when I was in counseling in Honolulu it wasn't just George I missed, I missed his daughter too.

Mom and Dad's Duxbury House

The house I grew up in on Tremont St was a small Dutch Colonial with a large circular driveway and beautiful field rock walls and stairs. Our one acre yard abutted a small swamp where we skated in the winter with our neighborhood friends.
We first went to Mrs. Clark's nursery school with ritz crackers and canned orange juice for snacks. Next we went to Duxbury public school for kindergarden; the hardest things we did there was getting our snow suits and mittens and boots on to leave. We also napped on the tile floor on a thin rug; that was hard too. I was Mary in the Christmas pageant we had wearing my mother's blue silk scarf on my head.
Grade school was next, in third grade I had Miss Paulding who had been my grandfather's, my father's and my teacher. She hit kids with a pointer in the bathroom. The town gave her a party when she retired; her gift was a new Pontiac sedan from Duxbury garage to replace her 1935 Buick. Grandpa Walter owned Duxbury Garage and had the Pontiac dealership.
Growing up in this house was not easy. My two sisters and I slept in the master bedroom, the walls were not plaster board but some form of cardboard used during the war for construction. Good for drawing on but, lousy for privacy. At night, I would say my prayers as fast as possible, accept a wet kiss from my grandmother and lie awake counting the rooms in my house compared to Sherry's or Pam's or Mrs. Day's across the street. As much as I could stretch the six rooms of my house my friends always had bigger homes, they all had more money.
Thus, began my interest in buying houses. I rode my fat tired second hand American bike up the hill past Mill Pond figuring how to buy the Sander's house; it was on the market for $28,000. I was twelve.

Duxbury Grammie's House

My mother left my father in Norfolk, Va. where he was stationed in the US Navy during WWII. She went back home to her mother's because she was pregnant with me and wanted to be at home when she had me. I assume my father agreed with her decision. My father was a nautical engineer at the Navy Ship yard. He wanted to be in the action in Japan but he got as far as San Francisco and the War was over.
I was born in a September hurricane at Jordan Hospital in Plymouth, Ma. in 1944. My father had a hard time hitch hiking from Virginiathrough the windy rains of the storm but he made it. Not soon enough for my mother. I was to go home to Grammie's house on Tremont St at Island Creek in Duxbury, Ma.. My crib and room was prepared by my two grandmothers Ella and Cindy.
Later the same bassinet held my daughter 39years later and 5000 miles away.
Mom and dad bought their own house further north on Tremont Street with the four thousand dollar(down payment) inheritance my mother received from her grandpa John, a bog man in Plymouth.
My paternal grandfather, Walter, wasn't so happy about their choice of house as he had chosen a house on Cove Street for them to buy. He had a strong emotional hold on my father who was a devoted son and worked as the head mechanic at Duxbury Garage until his premature death at age 59yrs.