I and you, we are two. I am here, you are there. Sitting, standing, walking, running, adding weight, tempting Fate, to set a date not soon, but late. Stay with one’s mate.
My aunt’s was Nate, for a while. He drove a convertible and gave my aunt a diamond ring. Told her not to put her arm out her car window lest someone be tempted to steal the ring.
She married another and moved to South Carolina, where he was a big wheel in a nylon stocking factory. She sent nylons to Ina with directions: Freeze them before wearing to lengthen their life. Of course, Ina did. Story was that a step was left out in manufacturing.
I’m no poet and boy, do I know it. However, Ina once had notebooks full of her verse. Then a fire so cruel took every one. It built up under the eaves where the notebooks were stored and she said she would never write any more.
She kept her word, except for now and then, when she used a poem for advertising in the photo display case down by the door in to the stairs up to the studio, or in the newspaper. (Those stairs had shallow risers and I could run up taking two at a time.) Or when I was editor-in-chief of the high school yearbook and thought that the tribute to our teachers should be in verse, and Ina wrote it, over my signature. She cared not and, anyhow, some of the kids knew.
One could say that she was selfless regarding family. In another time she would have gone on to college. One of her teachers at Ricker Classical Institute wanted to get her a scholarship to Colby. However, there was no money at home for college and Grampy denied her going. The story was that he did not want her to leave home, but he could not afford to send her at all, even with help.
The farm went through three bad years and income from the general store in Hodgdon was insufficient for the large family. So Grampy found the farm in Carmel, moved the family down, and worked as a potato inspector up through Aroostook.
Ina remained in Houlton to work in the studio. Porter’s first wife divorced him, sold their house and moved with their five kids to Maryland, near Washington, D.C. By 1926, when nine months had passed since the divorce, Ina and Porter were married.
We visited Carmel years later and my uncle Ernest let us watch him milk a cow. We got to taste the warm milk right from the pail. No desire on our part to learn how to milk. Or to live on a farm, for that matter.
Byrna Porter Weir was born and grew up in Houlton, where her parents, Ina and Porter, were portrait photographers. She now lives in Rochester, N.Y.
