Nonagenarian writes book, shares at reading in Palermo

Ninety-year-old Jeannette Scates reads from her book, There Wasn’t Always Peace in the Valley. (photo by Andy Pottle)

by Mary Grow

Nonagenarian Jeannette Scates signs one of her recently published books. (photo by Andy Pottle)

Guest speaker Jeannette Wood Scates shared excerpts from her recent memoir, There Wasn’t Always Peace in the Valley, with an appreciative audience at the Palermo Library’s 22nd annual board meeting, held July 14 at the library.

The valley is Hostile Valley in eastern Palermo, where Scates and her three older siblings grew up in the house their father built around 1930. The book’s cover photo shows the Wood children: Allen, Jeannette on the lap of older sister Rachel and oldest brother Harry, with their dog, Teddy.

Asked how Hostile Valley got its name, Scates referred to a poem quoted in the book written by her “Grammie Wood,” more formally Theresa Alice Bickford Wood, when she was a columnist using the byline Molly Malone for the Kennebec Journal, in Augusta. The last two lines read:

Every Valley man has a kindly heart
And a gol durned Hostile tongue.

The book is a collection of stories and memories, from which Scates read selections, to applause, smiles and chuckles. She started with the one she called her daughter’s favorite, titled “Worldwide Travelers.”

This story tells how the travelers started with take-out from “an eatery place called ‘Mama’s Kitchen,'” where they stocked up on molasses cookies with sugar on top and soda crackers with butter and mustard. They agreed on who would drive first, and on a destination – often Boston, perhaps as far as New York, where they admired the Stone Lady in the harbor.

The story ends: “We all piled out of the old, abandoned, junk car in the backyard – AND WE WERE HOME AGAIN!” Below is a photo of a rusty two-door station wagon, glassless, with ragged fenders, amid hood-high weeds.

Illustrations throughout show family members, neighbors and other memorable figures, including the rooster who used to chase Rachel and one of Harry’s Herefords, with Harry and Rachel. Asked about the pictures, Scates said many were taken with her Brownie Hawkeye camera that Rachel gave her for her 16th birthday.

Right after the travelers’ tale is the story of Scates’ father’s 40th birthday gift to her mother. She explains that her mother had no sled, nor snowshoes, nor skates, and so was left out of the children’s winter play.

Her father somehow found the money to buy his wife a pair of skates “with silver runners” and a pair of warm stockings. He gave one skate or one stocking to each of the four children to present simultaneously.

One of Scates’ father’s jobs was driving a snowplow for the town. The book shows the “Cleartrac Tractor with a Sargent Snowplow and wings” that the town bought in 1939 and “Daddy” drove.

Themes running through the book include an appreciation of the natural world and its changes, an appreciation of family and friends and an overriding optimism. Scates does not pretend life was easy. Everyone, children included, worked hard; money was scarce; her father died when she was eight years old; and after a long, happy marriage she is a widow.

Yet she wrote in the next-to-last essay in the book, “I have been through some hard times, but I can say that the biggest part of my journey has been so rewarding and special!” In addition to generations of family and friends, she credits the Lord “who has walked beside me most of my life, and when the times got hard, He carried me as He had promised He would do.”

Asked if there would be another book, Scates was hesitant. Asked about plans for her 90th birthday, which she was to celebrate July 16, she and her son, Rudy Scates, gave vague replies. Audience members sang Happy Birthday to her, and library personnel had prepared a special birthday treat.