While Helen’s father worked the farm, her mother kept a kitchen garden and a poultry yard, and looked after the family. After they moved into town, Helen’s father worked as custodian at the high school and later at the local college. In town, Helen’s father, like Vi’s grandfather, built a house with his own hands. It stood on a piece of land behind the house the family occupied. When he eventually sold both houses, her father was able to afford the larger house in which she raised her own family and lived most of her life.
Helen married when she was twenty. Her husband played the saxophone and the clarinet in a dance band. Though his first love was music, he took a job in a bank to support the family, and over the years played less and less. Helen had two children born close together, both boys, and when they were still quite small, the family moved back into what was now Helen’s parents’ home, a large, though plain, white house in a neighborhood of roomy Victorian houses and mature shade trees on the side of the hill overlooking the river valley and the mills. A self-contained apartment was created for them on the second and third floors. For the rest of their lives, Helen took care of her parents as well as her own family. Her mother was ill and bedridden for the last thirteen years of her life.
After her parents were both gone, the house also sheltered, for a few years following the end of World War II, a succession of displaced families from refugee camps in Germany sponsored by Helen and her husband, some of whom still send her cards in the nursing home. Helen’s sons left home and started families of their own, her husband eventually died, and Helen remained alone in the large house. For a brief time, she rented the second-floor apartment. The tenants were an elderly man and his teenage granddaughter. They left after the granddaughter became pregnant, and Helen did not rent the apartment again, but used the rooms for her sons and their families when they came to visit, and for storage. Now that Helen is gone, the house stands empty.
Employment
Both Vi and Helen began working at an early age, either helping their families or earning money outside the family.
Vi first worked outside the family at age nine, earning five cents for fetching water “for a woman.” One of Vi’s later jobs, with her first husband, was woodcutting: they would use a two-handled saw to cut up “pulp wood” to fill a box car, for which they would earn $500. If they “skinned the bark” off each tree, the load would earn them $600. Later, she worked as a laundress in a nursing home, and still later took jobs cleaning houses and offices.
Vi teases the girls in the office who say they are tired — they’ve been sitting in a chair all day!
At her current housecleaning jobs, Vi works steadily from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., rarely stopping, though she will occasionally pause to talk, standing where she is, for as long as ten minutes at a stretch. When she is working she does not like to eat lunch, but she will also, usually, stop once during the day to sit down at the kitchen table and eat a piece of fruit — a banana, a pear, or an apple. If she has not had a piece of fruit by the end of the day, she will take a banana, hold it up in the air with a questioning look, and then sit down sideways at the kitchen table to peel and eat it quietly, or she will take the piece of fruit home with her. In the warm and hot weather she likes to have a tall glass of cold water with an ice cube in it. The heat does not particularly bother her, though, even on days when the mercury is in the nineties.
She works steadily, but she does not hurry. She says her grandmother taught them to take their time doing a job and to be thorough. She will, as she says, “put the night and the day on it,” dusting every bar of a wooden chair and every spindle of a banister.
Vi’s employers value her work and are loyal to her. After her eighty-fifth birthday party, she went down to Washington to visit her granddaughter and stayed away far longer than she had planned. She was having work done on her teeth that extended week after week. Several months went by without a word from her, her bills piled up, and the telephone company threatened to cut off her phone service. She eventually made a visit back home to pay bills and contact employers, but in all this time no one made a move to replace her. Everyone simply got along as best they could until she was back again. She has been cleaning for the same office, a law office, for thirty years.
One of her longtime employers, an elderly woman, finally entered a nursing home. She complained to Vi that the people there did not know how to make a bed properly or to bathe her. She asked Vi if she would come to the home and continue to take care of her. Vi said she would do it in a minute, but she knew that the people who worked there would not let her.
Another employer moved to Washington and asked Vi please to move there with her and continue to work for her, but Vi would not consider moving from her home and community.
Helen helped her mother, who took in laundry, by delivering and picking up the clothes. One of her mother’s customers then employed Helen for a time in her own home, to sweep and serve meals. To earn pocket money, Helen would go out into the countryside, collect wildflowers, and sell them to craft hobbyists who pressed the flowers and used them to decorate trays.
Hope, who, at age 100, would be the third case in an expanded version of this study, used to bake her own bread as a child growing up on the edge of a small town in Iowa. She would sell it to her neighbors in order to pay the costs of supporting her pony. The pony was not her own, but was lent to her for the summer in exchange for the work she would do to gentle and train it.
After her children entered school, Helen took a job doing alterations at a small, family-owned women’s clothing store on Main Street. She would walk down to work and walk home again. Subsequently, she worked in the city of Hartford, also as a seamstress. To go there, she took a slow local train which wound its way through woods and past cemeteries and small towns.
Helen worked for four years for the clothing shop. The owner of this business and his wife looked after their employees, became friends with many of them, and continued some friendships long after the employment had ended. Helen’s working environment was, therefore, an emotionally sustaining one. After she had been in the nursing home a year, her old boss was admitted following a stroke. He lingered for a couple of weeks, and Helen would make her way slowly, with her walker, into his room to visit him. A tall, handsome man with a smooth, pale face, he lay back on his pillow staring at her with his bright eyes, but he did not know her. His wife, often there beside him, visiting, would try to remind him, but he would shake his head.
Physical Activity: Work and Play
Both Helen and Vi have had lives filled with physical activity, most consistently walking, including long-distance, and both spent significant amounts of time outdoors in the fresh air, especially as children, but also as adults. In both cases, once childhood was past, this activity principally consisted of work of one kind or another, either for themselves or for pay. But their leisure pursuits have often been active as well. Neither Vi nor Helen ever played a sport, but both danced regularly, and Vi’s travels have often included a fair amount of walking.
When Vi was a child, she walked into town for errands and to attend school. Apart from her mealtimes and the hours spent in school, she was physically active the entire day, at her chores and at play — principally outdoors — with her siblings, cousins, and friends. As a young and middle-aged adult, too, she was physically active all day, her time divided between work for her own or her family’s maintenance and work for pay, in both cases physical and active.