Karen -
What a great story. This is the story of Kitty - born Adele LeBourgeois Crockett Robertson in 1901 in Ipswich, MA. In the early 1930s, Ipswich was 33 square miles and had a population of about six thousand people. Before the Depression, Ipswich Mills (then the world's largest hosiery factory) was the town's chief employer. Almost half of the wage earners were employed by the Mills until the stock market crashed and the world changed. It was then, after Kitty's father's death, that Kitty returned to the Ipswich to save the Orchard that her father loved. In this book is her story, her struggles, and her defeats. After you read it, I wouldn't be surprised for you to think "gosh, I thought I had problems but they are nothing compared to the life that Kitty had".
I found her description of her beekeeping experiences to be really interesting. On one occassion she describes how she got a call from a neighbor who said he had "a few bees" in his atttic and he wanted her to get them out. She had to climb a ladder past the third floor windows and cut a hole in the side of the house to get access. More than 10 feet of space was "almost filled with monstrous combs, fastened to the ceiling, walls, and floor" . "There were a number of colonies living in the attic, each with its own queen and armies of workers, hundreds of thousands of insects". To remove the bees from the attic, Kitty had to find the Queens. Actually she had to find the correct queen for each colony. Kitty went to town and bought "a whole stack of twelve-gallon pails". She then proceeded to scoop up the honey comb, honey, and the bees into a bucket. She lowered the bucket down to the ground as the bees swarmed around their honey. "The pail hit the sill of the window on the second floor, tilted and the honey and combs poured down the side of the house". Kitty filled 20 buckets with, as she called it, "an unappetizing mess".
In her apple and peach growing business, Kitty at one point had 4500 boxes of apples in the cellar. But this was during the Depression and other people also had apples to sell. Life was not easy. In Kitty's last winter on the farm, the temperature went to 24 degrees BELOW zero. Could life can any harder?
Like I said, Kitty's story makes you appreciate your own story more. It was quite a book.
I found her description of her beekeeping experiences to be really interesting. On one occassion she describes how she got a call from a neighbor who said he had "a few bees" in his atttic and he wanted her to get them out. She had to climb a ladder past the third floor windows and cut a hole in the side of the house to get access. More than 10 feet of space was "almost filled with monstrous combs, fastened to the ceiling, walls, and floor" . "There were a number of colonies living in the attic, each with its own queen and armies of workers, hundreds of thousands of insects". To remove the bees from the attic, Kitty had to find the Queens. Actually she had to find the correct queen for each colony. Kitty went to town and bought "a whole stack of twelve-gallon pails". She then proceeded to scoop up the honey comb, honey, and the bees into a bucket. She lowered the bucket down to the ground as the bees swarmed around their honey. "The pail hit the sill of the window on the second floor, tilted and the honey and combs poured down the side of the house". Kitty filled 20 buckets with, as she called it, "an unappetizing mess".
In her apple and peach growing business, Kitty at one point had 4500 boxes of apples in the cellar. But this was during the Depression and other people also had apples to sell. Life was not easy. In Kitty's last winter on the farm, the temperature went to 24 degrees BELOW zero. Could life can any harder?
Like I said, Kitty's story makes you appreciate your own story more. It was quite a book.
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