Until about 1994 Grays lived in Plymouth. As in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, not the rock in Massachusetts, although we were there too, but I digress.
I grew up in Plymouth with my sisters, cousins and grandparents all right there. My dad was born and raised there. His dad, Keith Sr, was born and raised there. His grandfather, Edgar, and great-grandfather, Benjamin, all the way to his great-great-grandfather, Jesse jr lived there in Plymouth. For anyone who may not know, Plymouth is a very small community ... like just a few km (5 maybe?) and a population of probably no more than about 200. Everybody literally knew everybody else and many were related somewhere along the line.
My dad drove the school bus, just as Grampy had, and Uncle Gary did carpentry, but when they weren't out working their "regular jobs" they ran Gray Bros farm. We had some cattle, a couple of ponies now and then, but mainly we grew and sold potatoes and turnips. All of us kids spent many summer afternoons picking potatoes when the time came. As the oldest I sometimes got to steer the tractor. One year when they were plowing a field, for some reason the plow was too light and wasn't making deep enough furrows so I was used as "dead weight" to keep it down. Doesn't every 13 year old girl want to be used to weight things down? hmmm no. Anyhow, I perched there on the cross beam of the plow as it was pulled up and down the rows. Kinda hard on the butt but once we found an old seat cushion for me to sit on it wasn't too bad. In this picture on the left the cattle would have been in the pasture in the front, gardens were out behind the barn.
There's Grammy on the left, Grampy smoking his pipe on the right.
There was always an old wooden wagon wheel on a post just outside their back door. We would all climb on and whoever could reach the ground (yep, usually me) would push with 1 foot to make it spin. I don't recall anyone really ever getting hurt on it, though I'm sure someone went flying off of it at some time or another, it provided us with hours of dizzy spinny fun.
And now I come to the point of this post. Last week while talking to a friend about grandparents and when we were kids I had told her about how I grew up next door to Grammy and Grampy and every evening after dinner I would go over there for a few hours. Grammy and I would talk and talk, do crosswords, watch tv, knit, sometimes she'd tell me stories of when she was young. (Grampy was gone by then)
The next morning, Jan 23, 2014, I got a text from my sister. The old house had burned down in the night. Apparently nobody was living there at the time, arson is not suspected, it was a total loss.
I'm still coming to terms with it. I look at the pictures from the newspaper article, and then pictures of it the way I remember it. I just doesn't seem real. I know it'll hit me sooner or later, and then I'll grieve.
