EDITOR’S NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Gazette April 6, 1995.
WEST WHATELY — Now that she’s in her 80s, Olive K. Damon has been doing a little summing up. She’s always had an eye for what’s happening around her, mind you.
For years, she’s painted scenes of her beloved West Whately. Canvases cover walls throughout the Poplar Hill Road home she shares with her husband, Alan. She’s artfully pressed flower petals between thin sheets of plastic and found buyers for them.
Now, she’s searching her mind for things that happened in a little village that remains a place apart. She’s been collecting them, and writing them down. As in all memoirs, she tells a personal story.
But the neat, typewritten pages she readily shares with a visitor are peopled with more than family. She writes of neighbors sharing the daily paper. There is the dog that dropped in at the farm one day and never left. The cow that always looked at you when you spoke its name. The aunt who rescued a family stricken by a flu epidemic.
The “pledge paper” that went around West Whately one June morning in 1896 and gathered hundreds of dollars to build a chapel. Neighbors caring for one another’s children. A church that bought flowers for anyone who’d fallen ill in the village. The duck that walked around on little stubs because its feet had frozen off in a brook one night.
“You understand I’m not a writer — and these are not well-written,” Damon says of her writings. “It’s all right, in a way, for what it is. And it is all true.”
Though the pieces can now rightly be called memoirs, Damon says she’s been keeping a diary since she was a teen-ager. Her husband has kept a journal for half a century.
“It just came into my mind and I wanted to do it,” she says of her wish to collect her memories. “I got to thinking, I had such a happy childhood, such loving parents. If I wasn’t happy, I never would be doing this.”
First, she jots notes on a yellow pad, then sits at her typewriter at her kitchen table, where she remembers even more. “As I went along, some of the things I had to think about — and they came to me.”
Lately, Damon, who is 83, has been writing about life on the dairy farm she and her husband bought on Poplar Hill in 1937, across the street from where they now live. It was here they raised their son, Peter, a professor of art now in New York City.
She says this of the farmhouse she and Alan bought in 1937, perhaps rehearsing what will become her narrative: “It hadn’t been modernized at all. It took us 10 years to get that house into condition. We had to build up the farm first, of course, we couldn’t spend it on the house. So many people think a farmer doesn’t have to know anything. They have to know a lot about a lot of different things to succeed. We made it by being careful. And when we sold it, we did all right.”
Peter Crisci, a neighbor up Poplar Hill, thinks the modesty that comes through in Damon’s writing is one of its hallmarks, born of 50 years of hard work, with little time off. “Olive is almost self-deprecating in her modesty and her sense of her self,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of bragging. They don’t think of it as remarkable.”
It’s not, Look what we did. But simply, We did.
Damon has already finished pieces that recall the life of a much-loved aunt, the farm’s animals, the history of the West Whately Chapel and her grandfather. (Of that piece, she asks a reader, “You understood what kind of man my grandfather was, didn’t you? Back in those days, the father was the boss.”)
She uses the historian’s tone in her short but fact-filled chronicle of the birth of a tiny church. After a 1904 strawberry supper, she writes, nine quarts of leftover berries were sold for 75 cents.
And she notes that when church women started an improvement society, they decided that hostesses for meetings must serve the same menu: bread or biscuits, cold meat, pickles, one kind of cake, cheese, coffee and teas.
“Some years later it was voted that the hostess could serve a salad,” she writes. “Each guest must bring her own napkin.”
How will such stories be taken by people today, she is asked. “I don’t know. I am old, and I understand it,” she says. “But I don’t know what other people think.”