On Thanksgiving Day this year I wore my Moody’s Diner tee-shirt in honor of the passing of my cousin Diane, who passed away early that morning. (See “A Tale of Twin Cousins”). Her mother and father, my Aunt Frederica and Uncle Carl Hilton, also spent a lot of time at the diner. As senior citizens they used to eat lunch there every day.
I spent many hours there with them and with Diane myself. As adults we met there when I came home because it was half-way between where I was staying in the Rockland area and where she lived in Bremen.
When Diane retired, she returned to the farm in Bremen, buying it from her folks. Diane lived in the main house with her husband, Lee, and Aunt Freda and Uncle Carl lived in the bungalow, also on the property.
The farmhouse itself is over 200 years old. The salt water farm is on Rt. 32. If you take a sharp left off Rt. 1 in Waldoboro at the light just before Moody’s and follow Rt. 32, you will come upon Bremen. The property extends to the Medomak River on the lower end of the property.
As I “googled” Bremen to write this story, I happened upon a slide show of Bremen that Diane made which is on photobucket. She dearly loved her home town. You can access it by going to either:
or
www.tidewater.net/~bremen/ This is the Bremen home page. Just hit the slide show link at the end of the story. See the separate blog about Bremen itself.
Following are some of my memories of being on the farm with Diane and Mary Sue and sometimes my sister, Sally. We were a foursome as Diane and I were the same age, and Mary Sue and Sally four and five years younger, respectively.
There was once a store attached to the house, which the Hilton’s ran for many years. They also had an ancient gas pump where local people sometimes gassed up. It was great staying on the farm with your own personal candy and ice cream store just on the other side of the glass- paned door that went into the kitchen of the main house. I think we kids must have eaten up most of their profits.
On the top floor of the store, where they stored supplies etc. there was also an old pinball machine. Uncle Carl rigged it so that we didn’t have to put money in it in order to play. Diane and I used to play with that thing by the hours.
When Diane built her own modern house and attached it to the kitchen of the farmhouse, she had the store actually picked up and moved over the house to the other side.
The Hiltons were active in town business. Carl was a selectman for many years and eventually became a state representative. Freda did a lot of the town’s paper work. I believe she was either treasurer or tax collector or both at one time. I can see the big dining room table stacked high with paper work during tax time.
What was fun was the fact that Carl was also a justice-of-the-peace and as such could marry people. I remember the day when I was visiting and a young couple came to the kitchen door (the door used as access, generally,) to be married. They were very young, probably in their teens. I don’t think he married them at that moment, but I do remember him asking them some pertinent questions. One of them I believe was, “Do your parents know you are getting married?”
Some of my fondest and most memorable memories of the farm concerns hay. Uncle Carl used to “hay” his own fields and also helped to “hay” his neighbor’s fields. He didn’t bail his hay, so that meant he needed some feet to tramp it as he went along. That chore generally fell to Diane and me, a chore we enjoyed very much. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that you sometimes came upon a big spider while you were tramping.
One day, we went with Uncle Carl to a neighbor’s field. Uncle Carl forked the hay into this loft, which Diane and I were tramping. All of a sudden I dropped about six or eight feet. Come to find out there was a hole in the loft floor that went down into the pig sty. There were no pigs in attendance at that time, but I sure was surprised. I think I blacked out for a minute, but recovered quickly. It was a shock more than anything.
Other memories of hay include the search Diane and I sometimes went on in the hay loft of their farm hunting for new farm kittens we could hear mewing. I had a lot of fun with the farm kittens as I was never allowed to have a pet at home in Rockland.
Other memories I have of the farm involve food and fresh fruit and vegetables fresh right out of the ground. Strawberries, string beans, peas, corn and blueberries to name a few. Aunt Freda was a wonderful cook and those strawberries sure tasted good when she make homemade shortcake and real whipped cream to go on top. We kids were employed to pick strawberries. I think we ate more than we picked though. Aunt Freda used to have a stand beside the road to sell them.
She also made the best bread, rolls, and specialty breads. At one time later on, she was a pastry cook at one of the local restaurants in the area. I don’t think she even knew what a “box mix” was.
I remember the breakfast she made for Uncle Carl before he went to work the fields. Oftentimes it was homemade beans and biscuits, coffee, and the “cream” that came off the top of the milk when he put his milk cow’s milk through the separator.
We kids had a lot of places to roam on the farm. We didn’t go down as far as the water very often because there was “quicksand” of a kind down there. There were also woods on the property and a natural spring which supplies water to the farm. We spent many happy hours roaming the farm and skating in the gravel pit which froze over with trapped water in the winter.
We also worked. Diane could drive the tractor by the time she was twelve. I loved riding on that thing. We also raked blueberries and picked vegetables and I remember one year when I helped plant pumpkin and squash seeds with Diane.
Uncle Carl also had a farm hand at times in the person of a man called “Charlie.” Charlie had somehow literally lost his tongue so that it was hard understanding his speech. He lived down the road a ways from the farm. However, he was a good worker and you would see him walking up to the farm to work.
We also got to go swimming over at Biscay. We usually ended up at the ice cream store in Round Pond after we got through swimming.
There is also a one-room schoolhouse on the property which was owned by the family. Diane went to school there as a child. I even got to go once when I was visiting on a school holiday. I got a big kick out of seeing all the classes in one room. The building was not used after a while and eventually my Uncle Carl helped make it into a living space for Mary Sue. She lives there today.
Now Diane’s house, the farmhouse, and the bungalow stand empty. Her husband Lee is ill and may not return to the farm. She didn’t have any children. Diane had begun to restore the farmhouse. Most recently she redid the oak floor in the dining room. She had also repaired the roof and removed the front porch which had become dangerous to walk or stand on. We used to sit out there of a summer evening with Uncle Carl and Aunt Freda and Uncle Carl would point out all the constellations to us, which you could see clearly out there in the country.
Whatever happens to the farm from here on in, I hope it is used and doesn’t become an “abandoned” farm statistic. Some of the land is being used as an experimental farm by a nice couple Diane let use the land. I’m sure Mary Sue will keep a good eye on everything.
The picture below was taken at my folk’s 25th wedding anniversary in 1955. This is the “FAB FOUR” all dressed up for the occasion. From the left standing in front of the fireplace at the Fulton Street house, are: Mary Sue, Diane, Me, and Sally. Sally and Mary Sue are wearing the dresses Diane and I wore at her sister, Cynthia’s wedding. We were flower girls. Diane and I are wearing the gowns we wore at Rainbow Girls in Rockland.
As my sister said recently, “and then there were three.”
Thanks for listening.
Note: If you would like to read other blogs where Diane; the farm; and our lives together are mentioned, see the archives for: “Thanksgiving Dinner To Go,” Nov. 2010; “Snow Pictures from the Farm in Bremen,” January, 2011; “The Last Day of February,” Feb., 2011; “Kissin’ Kousins,” March, 2011; “Mechawana,” July, 2011; and “A Tale of Twin Cousins,” November, 2011.
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