1929

Most people remember it as the year the stock market crashed, but the first month was not bad for my family. In fact it was probably the happiest time my mother had ever known. Not long after she was married my dad found a job working for a dredging company on the coast. The result of the project was called The Inland Waterway, and today it is a well traveled route for small sea craft from all over the world. With minimum sailing experience you can take a boat from the Florida Keys to Maine by just following the buoys marking the current, and never seeing the ocean. My mother spent most of the year boarding with a family in Swansboro, a quaint fishing village below New Bern. She remained friends with the people on the street the rest of her life. In her father's home she had been very unhappy.

In 1918 my mother was barely 8 years old when she found herself caring for both her four younger siblings and her parents. She took Mamie, the new baby, to her aunt's house and cared for the two year old, Naomi, until she died. It was the beginning of the flu epidemic. Her father survived, but Mama remembered standing at the foot of the bed watching her mother die, her father being too sick to be aware.

They lived in a beautiful log cabin with two bedrooms in the loft. The only son in the family, Uncle Durwood, inherited everything- the rule of primogeniture-and I remember visiting him there when I was very small, thinking what a wonderful, cosy house with gardenia bushes all around and pink roses climbing on the walls. Her mother, Lydia McArthur Robinson, was petite with jet black hair and eyes, and her work ethic affected my mother, and eventually me and my brother. I wish I could have known her.

Left with three children to raise, her father did his best. All of the children worked on the farm, and my mother did the cooking. After five or six years, her dad married a girl only a year older than Mama. Sally Taylor took over my mother's life. She was sent out to work on other farms, and turned over all her earnings to her stepmother. My grandfather bought one of the first cars in the county, taught his new wife to drive, but Mama did not ride in it very much. There were not many rules in the house, and 'Sook' as they called her, put an end to many things like eating between meals. She even put a lock on the pie safe where the left overs were kept. The only person my mother truly disliked was Sook. I only saw her once. Mama pointed her out in a doctor's office full of people. She looked like a skeleton to me, with parchment thin skin, and she did not recognize us.

I was delivered by a real doctor, unlike my other siblings who were delivered at home by a midwife. I don't think my dad was there, but I don't know. A few days before he was at a New Years Eve company party in Delaware. He brought his party hat for my first gift. I had until I was married.

When Daddy came home, he moved Mama and me two houses down the street where we rented an upstairs bedroom from a sea captain and his wife, Earnest and Helen Wessel. Cpt. Earnest was at sea most of the time. Miss Helen, from Pascagoula, Miss, the beautiful girl who fell in love with the German captain who had left his homeland rather than fight in WW l, went to sea with him until one day, in a storm, she fell overboard. She never left shore again.

Miss Helen spoiled me, always thought of me as her baby. Mama watched Miss Helen enter an affair with Mr. Bill Toler next door. Mrs. Toler developed pneumonia, was recovering, but suddenly died. Helen and Bill took off together as soon as he could sell his home, bought a house boat and lived moored by the city dump for sixteen years.

We visited them several times as I was growing up. Miss Helen worked in a laundry to support them, because Bill was disabled most of those years. A woman who had been pampered by her capitan and given every luxury became a drudge, looked terrible. When Bill died she returned to Swansboro, and he took her back. Cpt. Earnest only lived a year.

One day when I was a senior in high school we got a letter from Miss Helen, telling us the whole story. Eventually, during my first semester in college, she talked my dad into moving to Swansboro, and moving in with her. She gave us the house, but over the next nine years she nearly drove my mother crazy. My dad had remained friends with the dredging company and
had gone back to work for them, so they had left her alone, and were living in Washington, D.C. when my brother checked on her and found her dead in bed. There were only five people at her funeral,

The capitan's house is on the state register. Miss Helen's ghost has been heard by many people, climbing up and down the enclosed staircase, with her customary glass of iced tea, the ice cubes tinkling against the glass.