Lucille Crowther is Florence, Massachusetts. She is 93 years of Florence.
Crowther, who goes by “Lou,” still lives in the house in the Northampton village where she raised her four children. She tends to her flower garden, she misses her friends who are gone, and she worries that the air conditioner will break while she is still living there.
Crowther remembers when she and husband, Cyril, known as “Cy,” were young, they would ride their bikes into Northampton for a 10-cent movie at The Calvin.
When the couple bought their house on Bliss Street in Florence, and raised a family there, she says, they never locked the doors. Indeed, if they weren’t home when the milkman came by, he would go into their kitchen, look in their refrigerator to see what they were short of, and leave them what they needed.
“If we happened to be home when he came by,” she said, “we would offer him a chair at the table and he’d eat with us.”
The milkman wasn’t the only one to make home deliveries in the neighborhood back in the 1950s. Once a week, a produce truck from Hadley would come down her street, and she and all the neighbors would go out to pick what they wanted off the truck. And in even earlier days, an ice truck came around, delivering ice.
Though those home-delivery days are long-since gone, Crowther says, she doesn’t think Florence has changed much since she was raising her kids 70 years ago.
“It still feels very much the same,” she said. “Florence is anchoring … in a good way. Other parts of the country feel so transient — like you could just blow away.”
Crowther has lived in Florence her whole life. Her parents moved there from North Dakota to work at the Silk Mill in Florence.
“The windows were so large at the Silk Mill that when you walked by, you could see all the workers in there making stockings,” she said.
Crowther’s late husband was also born in Florence; his father owned Model Bakery in the heart of town. In 1941, shortly after the two were married, Cy Crowther joined the U.S. Navy, and served for three years.
“Some of my favorite memories are of when my oldest daughter, Carol — who was just a babe — and I used to travel to where Cy was stationed,” Crowther said.
They lived for a time, close to where her husband was, in Rhode Island, in Florida and in Pennsylvania. Traveling with her daughter to be close to her husband, Crowther got to see other parts of the country for the first time.
“I find myself thinking about those times often these days,” she said.
When Cy Crowther returned from the service, the couple lived in Hampshire Heights, which was originally built for families of men who were in the military, and veterans.
“It was a strong community,” Crowther recalled. “I had many friends there, and all helped raise each other’s children.”
Cy Crowther went to work at the International Silver Co. in Florence, and then later at the ProBrush factory. The couple had two more children, Donna and Maureen, and saved enough money to buy a house with an acre on land, set on the Mill River, where she’s lived since. Once there, Crowther says, her husband set to work on creating a magnificent garden.
“We grew so much in our garden, we barely had to buy anything from the produce truck,” she said.
The kids sold the flowers and produce from their garden on the corner of Nonotuck and Bliss streets during shift breaks at the ProBrush Factory.
“Everyone at ProBrush knew our children — and our garden,” she said with a smile.
These days, Crowther still tends to her garden every day.
“It’s not what it was when Cy was alive,” she said, “but it’s what I do with my time.”
Cy Crowther died 24 years ago, and since then, his wife has been responsible for the garden and her house. She decided long ago to let the vegetable garden go.
“That was Cy’s job,” she said. “I didn’t know how to keep that up.”
She did maintain perennial gardens in her back and front yards, but for the past four years, due to a fractured shoulder, she’s had to focus on smaller gardening projects in her front yard.
“I’m out there every day in the summer,” she said. “In the winter, I do all the projects my house needs that I couldn’t do in the summer because I was busy in the garden.”
Crowther’s youngest daughter, Donna, lives nearby and helps with errands and other work that needs doing. Maureen, her youngest, drives up from Connecticut to visit on weekends. And Carol, the eldest daughter, now 71, calls her mother from Austin, Texas, every Sunday evening.
“What’s hard now,” Crowther said, “is that all my friends are gone. … My friend Bonnie used to come over and we would sit on the front porch and talk and talk, but she’s gone now. And then it’s just one after another.”
She says the house is a lot of work, but she’s happy to still be living there.
“I’d go bananas living in a nursing home. I can’t sit all day long; I have to get up and do something,” she said. “I have plenty to do here — I have the garden.”
Keegan Pyle can be reached at ValleyStoryPlace@gmail.com.