So much is unknown....

     I don't know why I don't know more about my mother.  We have no pictures of her in her childhood, though she used to say Helen had a family picture, and my mother wished we could have seen what she looked like as a child.  That picture never appeared.  She was born in Troy: I used to know the street, but I've forgotten.  She was the 5th child born to Ellen and her young husband, who was most likely sick with terminal tuberculosis when my mother was born, as he died before she was a year old.  The only memory of him handed down to her was her mother's telling her that he, bedridden with his sickness, expressed amazement that his baby daughter could walk around the room at the age of 9 months.  Life must have been vey difficult.  I don't know how they survived before the eldest son, Timothy, was able to work at jobs around the city when some business owner needed extra help.
      I think my mother must have been a beautiful child, though that would have been in the days when compliments were mostly withheld as a contributor to  vanity.  Years later, a man who'd gone to school with her told me he could still picture her running across the fields from her home in Pittstown to the store in what is now Speigletown.  He said her long red hair caught the sun's rays as she ran, creating a kind of  glow. He called her hair red, but my mother would not have said she had red hair; it was probably more an auburn brown, wavy and thick.  She was, at 11 years old, as tall as her adult height, about 5 feet and 8 inches, unusually tall for a girl, or woman, back in those days.  She would describe, on the few  occasions when she spoke of her young self, how she could stand on one foot, grasp the toes of her other foot in her hand, and spin around in a circle.  One other thing I know is that she loved to ride their old plow horse, and that she loved horses and ponies for the rest of her life.......