My mother---life saver

 One day in the early 1950's, when my mother was in the field next door tending to the goats that were tethered there in daytime, she was approached by the young woman whose family had just moved into the apartment above the then post office. 

  They engaged in friendly conversation, the woman telling her she had moved here from Pennsylvania with her husband and two young children. They met a few times, always friendly and social, but then one day the woman confided to my mother that she was in desperate circumstances, with no jobs or income, and that she planned to kill her children and then herself. She even detailed how she would do it; she would strangle her toddler daughter and smother her young son. 

   My mother never told me what words she used in reply, but she told her she could get help. We didn't have a telephone at the time, and my mother didn't drive, so I assume she probably told Sara, who knew a lot of people in town. I was too young to have been involved, but it seems that Flanagan, the chief officer at the Valley Falls Mill, must have been contacted because both the husband and wife got jobs at the mill and my mother cared for the two kids, aged 3,  and 17 months. Those were the first kids my mother cared for besides us and she did so for several years.