for the summer although the lobster season ended the last day of June. She remembered the noise of the factory. She remembers her father and John going to the shore at night to get seaweed for the fields. Their lives were ruled by the tides and if the seaweed was deposited at night, that is when they gathered it. The next tide might carry it away.

Besides the seaweed they made use of lobster bodies from the canneries to fertilize the fields. It was only with the change from growing table stock to growing seed that commercial fertilizers came into use. Island crops were abundant, hay, especially always was spectacular. Her husband, Patrick Giddings, was quite surprised at the richness and height of the hay crop. He remarked that people of his native Cambridge would really have their eyes opened if they could see the hay on Boughton Island.

Mary I. made trips to Georgetown where her grandparents lived. Her grandfather, the tailor, had a recurring drinking problem and her mother and later, Mary herself, would go to Georgetown with the idea of sobering him up. Her grandmother used snuff. She would dry a fig of black twist chewing tobacco on the top of the stove and then turn back the tablecloth and cut it very fine with a knife. If her husband would come in, she would very swiftly put the tablecloth back in place and begin to hum innocently. Mary suspected that she wasn’t fooling her grandfather. He must have wondered where his twist tobacco was going. She did not really enjoy her trips to Georgetown and would be overjoyed to hear John’s boat engine in the harbour signaling that her exile was over.

?Q9

’y’mgf-.

, LN

Frank and Dan MacCormack holding Patrick and lim Giddings

Courtesy, lennie lessnm

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