Debra Kiel
Posted Oct 20, 2020
at 09:51am
Mom was devoted to her family and everything she did was in some way connected with making their life happy leaving us with lots of reasons to try and be like her in so many ways.
Some of my first memories were of living in Tallahassee across from the capitol building while my father was in graduate school. Mom had the three of us girls by that time and it must have been a handful in a small upstairs apartment. It snowed the winter we were there and we girls wanted to make a snowman on the lawn there. I don’t remember if any of us had mittens but I know I didn’t and mom walked us to a store to get some for me. I still remember my hands being so cold on the walk to the store and warm on the way back.
She was also a great seamstress and with great excitement that same year she made me a poodle skirt from felt . I was about five years old at the time and just dripping with anticipation of this wonderful creation that would flare and twirl. Her only mistake was to then decide to wash the skirt before I wore it and felt doesn’t take kindly to hot water and agitation. What came out I remember looked mostly like a spider web. It was gray, like a poodle, but that’s about all you could still tell of the skirt.
Her sewing machine was a Singer treadle that I also learned to sew on, starting out trying to make clothes for my Barbie doll. I remember she stayed up very late one Christmas Eve to make pajamas for my stuffed fox as I realized too late that I hadn’t come up with a gift for him. The machine at that time must have been in my bedroom as I remember the sound of the treadle and the comfort of knowing my Chipper was going to have a special gift from me in the morning.
We girls never lacked for things to do as she made sure we had plenty of board games and crafts. One summer it was paint by numbers, another it was crewel work paintings, many of which still hang in her house. We had an assortment of animals including a resident guinea pig with a hutch in the kitchen who would get up on a little wooden bed we made him, lay down and stretch out his legs for a nap. I’m sure many of mom’s salon clientele remember Toby very well as he had a disconcerting habit after his bedding was renewed of backing up to his screen walls and peeing, then rooting madly under his stairs until the new straw suited him.
Mom made sure we always had a vacation before school started and she packed up everything we needed including Toby and his big hutch to bring with us to a little camp on St. Albans Bay for a week each summer. If you have never been to camp on the lake you are missing an experience everyone should have. We girls loved the wooden bunks with curtains, the dock, and the old rowboat dad used to take us out fishing in (especially me as I had more patience). I remember collecting clam shells from under the dock, a wild storm one night that waved over the dock and allowed the sheepshead fish I had caught the day before to escape from the pail I had it in, and learning to like the crunch of fried perch tails. You never get over Lake Champlain once you’ve been in it or on it.
Of course we had a Lassie dog, well know as she made the rounds around the neighborhood for treats as many dogs did during those days. Lassie never at regular dog food, mom cooked her supper after she was done cooking ours. When dad and mom moved back to Jericho from Newport two black cats came with them; Pierre and Minoux.
In St. Albans, being too close to a busy road for dogs or cats, she had favorite chipmunks, a wild bunny that would appear now and then, and crows that she made treats for the last winter I was with her. She loved seeing the crows hop carefully towards a muffin, then jump back if it didn’t look quite right. They eventually, of course, ate anything she made, and one crow would station himself in the tree by the driveway and call the others when I put the scraps out. The crows were better entertainment for her, then pretty much confined to her chair by the window, than any other type of bird feeder would have been.
Flowers were her passion, one that I inherited, and she grew outstanding roses in Jericho, at one point having a long trench in the ground where she would carefully lay down her climbing rose and cover it so it would survive the winter. In St. Albans she started growing wonderful hybrid daylilies, many of which I have in my gardens today. She didn’t just want to keep this beauty to herself; she potted and sold plants for many years by her driveway meeting many folks along the way including her very special friends Eleanor Fish and her daughter Helen Hader from Maine who continued to come and visit her every year even after she stopped selling flowers.
Helen brought her mother to see mom this summer which was really the highlight of her year. Eleanor and mom would put their heads together as hearing was an issue, and you could see both of their faces just light up as they talked with each other.
Mom also had a wonderful family next door who kept a constant check on her, and were always ready and willing to help out in any way at any time. Mom was fiercely independent and didn’t like to depend on others, sometimes seeming overly wary around people at times but Maureen and Bernadette were so good hearted and compassionate that they overlooked her quirks and she came to love them as well as their boys who took care of her lawn and other little odd jobs for years and we are so grateful to them for this.
Mom accomplished things that nowadays seem to take more energy than most of us can muster; but she sacrificed gladly and I know given the chance she would do it all over again.