Mary & Her Sisters
Mom was the youngest of 5 sisters, shown here: Edna, Mary, Joey, Marlene and Bernadette.
Mom was the youngest of 5 sisters, shown here: Edna, Mary, Joey, Marlene and Bernadette.
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SubscribeThe main photo was edited with the help of mom's version of photoshop - a knife. She was much younger than her sisters, who were born close together. So, she carved up a photo of herself as a toddler and stuck it in. Mom was big on scrap-booking and she did it old school. Pictured here: Edna, Mary, Joey, Marlene and Bernadette.
All but one of mom’s sisters lived outside of Newfoundland (for most of my life) and visits were a big deal. The oldest sister, Bernadette, would visit mom every time mom had a new baby - no easy feat considering mom had 7 kids and Bernadette was a single mother of 9 who lived in the US.
Sometimes mom travelled to visit her sisters, but most of the time family tended to congregate at my grandmother’s house in Stephenville, which was easy for us because we also lived in town. We called our grandmother "mama", pronounced kinda like "meh-meh".
Mama had a double-sized kitchen with 2 stoves, one of which was an ancient wood stove she used for heat during electrical knock-outs and occasionally for baking when the regular stove was full with a turkey. Whenever a winter storm kicked out the power in Stephenville mom would bundle us into a taxi and we’d go to Mama’s house. We’d sit around the stove in a kitchen lit with candles and kerosene lamps, our feet in slippers hand knit by Mama and mugs of hot cocoa in our hands.
The kitchen was the centre of mama’s home, partly because of its size, which allowed for a lot of people doing a lot of things at the same time. A typical get-together might see my grandmother baking in the kitchen — she never made less than 12 loaves of bread at a time — while someone else would be sewing or quilting and there might be a baby being fed or children playing board games. Often there were fabric and patterns all over the floor, I liked cutting out the shapes others would sew or digging through a jar of buttons to find the right number of matching bits. This was room where I first learned to be creative.