“Mary’s got neuralgia again.” “The cows got into Mary’s flower bed.” “Mary’s dog Jock was deathly sick from rat poisoning.” “It’s so sad—Mary’s mama died.”
My children are very polite, with nods and an appropriate, “Oh, no” and “How awful.”
Carlene Phillips holds one of Mary Abbot’s diaries at a presentation she gave to a Garden Club and Woman’s Club joint meeting on Monday, Feb. 28. The painting, which shows Mary in her garden, is by her sister, artist Agnes Abbot.(Courtesy photo)
But I can feel them secretly rolling their eyes and mouthing to one another, “I’m so sick of Mary!” And I don’t blame them.
For the past month I have been reading the diaries of Mary P. Abbot. They are very small, black books, each with a year’s worth of entries on thin, lined paper. The Historical Society owns them, except for 13 years that are missing. The diaries start in 1913, when Mary and her brother Frank bought a house and orchard on Bolton Road and started Bare Hill Farms. And they end abruptly on March 8, 1952, with the entry: “Got John to do errands. Have a cold in my head.” I know from her obituary that Mary died a few days later at the Nashoba Community Memorial Hospital in Ayer.
To say I’ve been obsessed with Mary is putting it mildly. It’s one thing to admire all Mary did for Harvard—from founding the Garden Club of Harvard, to being active in almost every other organization in town, to helping run the orchard, to activism in civic matters. But my family can attest that I have gone way beyond admiration. They would say I have sailed over the edge.
When my son Don got home one evening three hours later than I would have expected, he popped in to tell me he had gotten a flat tire in Fitchburg and had to have the car towed to Boxborough and then figure out how to get home. Instead of being sympathetic to the hassle of all he had been through, I immediately told him that Mary was always getting a flat tire in the Model T. In fact, once on Old Slough Road she got two flat tires. Even in the 1937 Chrysler, she’d come out of the store to find a tire flat.
When one of my daughters remarked that it was freezing in my house, I told her that in 1918, Feb. 4 was the coldest night on record. With 14 degrees below zero the next day, Mary and Frank couldn’t sit in the dining room. It was 50 degrees—and that was with the fireplace going. For a brief moment I wondered if I had been turning down my thermostat out of some weird empathy for Mary. But, no, I’m doing that because oil is $3.37 a gallon. Right?
Mary confessed she didn’t cook, but she recorded that once, when the housekeeper wasn’t there, she had cooked a chicken—“one of our own”—and that it had been successful. Perhaps subconsciously thinking that if Mary could do it, I could too, I asked one of my girls how I could cook chicken that wouldn’t be inedibly dry. Just like Mary’s brief foray into cooking, mine turned out to be quite successful. Of course, my chicken came from Idylwilde—there are limits to my over-identification disorder.
In the recent snowstorm when someone expressed sympathy for the plow drivers, I responded that in Mary’s day—before the town purchased a motorized plow—a crew of men had to break the roads with a team of horses. My point was?
My new BFF was a voracious reader, and I love that she too found “Pride and Prejudice” delightful and had no comment on “Moby Dick.” I could identify with Mary when she said that when a friend gave her a plant or when she bought one, it would often sit for a while before she found room for it in her border. I totally understand how she never staked her white peony in time, hated pruning the mock orange, and welcomed purple and white violets into her border.
I was thrilled to find a clump of snowdrops in bloom—right before the recent snow buried them. But my excitement dimmed when I remembered that poor Mary’s snowdrops hadn’t bloomed until March 17, and that was a record. When my back hurts, I know just how Mary felt and agree with her that, despite the doctor’s advice, exercises are a nuisance. And I’ve even started to wonder if my kids would consider calling me mama instead of mom.
Mary wrote about clubs’ activities for the Harvard Hillside and the Clinton Courant, so it seems only appropriate that I write about Mary for the Harvard Press. March is women’s history month, the perfect time to contemplate the many ways in which Mary Abbot was an exceptional woman. I promise not to go too far over the edge.
