My earliest memories are of life in a small Tudor cottage with diamond pane windows, at the edge of the Bucolic Phillips estate in Glenbrook, Connecticut. It was 1945 and my father and my maternal grandfather were off in the Burma Campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II.

Transformations

We tell stories.

We tell stories to make sense of our lives.

We tell stories to communicate our experience of being alive.

We tell stories in our own distinct voice. Our own unique rhythm and tonality.

Transformations is a weekly story-telling column. The stories are written by community members who are my students. Our stories will be about family, love, loss and good times. We hope to make you laugh and cry. Maybe we will convince you to tell your stories.

— Kathrin Seitz

“Everyone, when they get quiet, when they become desperately honest with themselves, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” — Henry Miller

Kathrin Seitz teaches Method Writing in Rockport, New York City and Florida. She can be reached at kathrin@kathrinseitz.com.

Mom, a stunning 24-year-old brunette, found work in a defense plant on the graveyard shift. Besides Mom, my maternal grandmother, (Grandma Alma) Uncle David and I were the only residents of the charming cottage in the woods during the war years.

Grandma was a staunch patriot and an extremely religious Christian Scientist. She was tall, with a severely erect posture and snow-white hair. I realized later on that she must have gone gray prematurely since she was only in her 40s at the time. She was my teacher, my protector and my biggest fan. Every morning she would put a new letter of the alphabet on the chalk board in the kitchen. She loved to tell the story (indicating what a three-year-old genius she thought I was) of the morning I came down to the kitchen and saw the new letter of the day, an “F.” My response was, “Oh look, the ’E’ is broken.”  That was proof enough for Grandma that I was gifted. Grandma was in charge of me from the time I got up in the morning until the time that my Uncle David came home from high school. Then my care was in his hands.

I adored my 16-year-old uncle. He was the most positive male presence in my young life. A nice looking man, he just missed being handsome,but  he had a most pleasant countenance. He would take me everywhere with him… square dance lessons at the local fire house, to the malt shop with his friends, or to his “girlfriend” Shirley’s house. Sometimes he would dance me in his arms around the room singing one of his favorite songs, “Wunderbar.. He had a magnificent deep voice.

Of course, being only three years old at the time, I didn’t find out till years later that he was a homosexual (despite my father’s frequent reference to David’s business partner, Robert, as “David’s wife.”) As an adult, years later, I wrote him a letter telling him how much I appreciated all he had done for me in those early years. How I couldn’t imagine a teenage boy being such a loving caregiver. I had wondered why I never felt as though I was a burden for him. He had never made me feel as though I was an annoying chore that his teenage self had to tolerate. It was then that he told me that I had been his best friend. As a confused gay adolescent, he had felt marginalized and different from the other kids and that my unconditional adoration of him had helped him through this dark era.

When Grandma got me up in the morning she’d often take me into her bed and she would make up stories about a little girl, Nancy, and her kitty, “Inky” and how we’d escape to a candy-filled wonderland where my favorite Necco Wafers would grow on trees. As you can imagine, Inky was black. He was a big cat with extra toes on his white paws. He looked as though he were wearing white baseball mitts. Inky lived with us, but he wasn’t my special friend who would want to run away with me. He was aloof and liable to give someone a monumental scratch if they rubbed his belly. But that didn’t matter. Those were special times for me with the world far away and Grandma and I snuggled in the comfortable bed in the sun-filled room with the blue and white coverlet. To this day, almost 70 years later, whenever I see a blue and white coverlet, a warm and happy feeling comes over me.

Grandma and I would wash up each morning. I can still recall how furiously she brushed her teeth, bent over the sink, head bobbing as she scrubbed away. For Grandma cleanliness was definitely close to Godliness. I imitated all she did. I can still smell the toothpaste we used and, in fact, it is the one I use to this day (Colgate). Once our faces were washed, our teeth brushed and our clothing donned, we’d go downstairs for breakfast. Grandma would put on her apron and fire up the water heater. I could smell the sulfur of the kitchen match striking as Grandma would light the water heater and I could hear the sibilant hiss and the whoosh as the gas ignited. The smells of bacon frying, bread toasting and juice being squeezed from the orange rind all have the ability, still, to bring me back to mornings in that sweet cottage on Rose Lane.

Nancy Thompson is the mother of a blended family of six children, 12 grandchildren and is expecting her first great-grandchild this month. She grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and migrated to Maine in 1998. Her grandparents were summer residents of Owls Head and it was there that Nancy fell in love with Midcoast Maine.  Nancy has served as president of the Camden Rockport Lincolnville Newcomers’ Club, president of the Women’s Fellowship of the First Congregational Church of Camden and as president of the Rockport Garden Club. As the head of her neighborhood organization, the Sea Street Sundowners, Nancy is the organizer of the neighborhood Fourth of July Block Party in the village of Rockport.

My uncle and my grandmother both cherished me and made me feel very special. In fact, my grandmother called me her “very special.” Each morning she and I would have breakfast in the dining room and, along with the radio, we’d pledge allegiance to the flag and sing the “Star Spangled Banner.” I loved it because it was the only time I was allowed to stand up in my high chair. I certainly had no idea of what I was saying or singing. I was only three years old after all and capable only of mumbling along. It is strange, however, that when I started school a few years later, those words easily came back to me.

Being the oldest member of my family it fell to me to make the critical decisions when, at 78 years of age, David was felled by a burst cerebral aneurism. Whether to cease life support, whether to donate organs or tissue, to cremate or bury and where his final resting place would be. I wound up sprinkling some of his ashes here in Maine in places that he loved and he is interred in my family cremation lot at the Sea View cemetery. He loved the Belted Galloways and I know that he is happy in his final resting place and is happy with the fact that I will be there too someday.

The love and attention that I received from Grandma Alma and Uncle David during those war years have carried me through some of the darkest points in my life.  It is a kind of symmetry that David carried me through the beginnings of my life and that I cared for him at the very end of his.

My younger sisters will tell you that I got all the self-confidence in the family…so thank you Uncle David and thanks, Grandma Alma.