After opening up the subject of our neighbor, “Betsy,� I find that I recall more than can be squeezed into this space, so here is “Betsy, part two.�
Betsy went to Winsted not more than once a week and if she happened to decide to go on a Friday, there was an even chance that she wouldn’t make it until the following week, due to the tight time constraints. She hardly ate enough to keep a bird alive, and her sojourns to the grocery store sometimes didn’t result in more than two large carrots — one for her to cook up and the other for the woodchuck that lived under her front porch.
That woodchuck had lived under there for longer than she had owned the place, and rarely did she fail to buy him a carrot. The funny thing was that she used to pay me 50 cents an hour to sit on the stone wall with my .22 caliber rifle to shoot him. My father, perhaps because of what had happened to him with S. E. Parker’s woodchuck, told me to sit and wait as long as she was willing to pay me, but if I did shoot, to be sure and aim somewhere other than at the ’chuck. I had that woodchuck in my sights I don’t know how many times, but he always escaped unscathed.
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Fifty cents an hour in those days was a princely sum for a young fellow, but that was what she always paid me. I mowed the lawn and kept the yard in good repair, and one time she had me clean out her cellar.
The cellar wasn’t in too good shape, but there was one corner that had the remains of a long-unused potato bin. One side of this bin consisted of a 2-inch thick pine board that was about 4 feet long and nearly square. It truly had come from an immense tree. The problem was that it was completely riddled with dry rot. To look at the board, it appeared in good, sound condition, but you could poke your finger through it anywhere, as it consisted of red powder held in place by a membrane of wood no more than one-sixteenth of an inch thick.
I was about to knock it apart and get rid of it as soon as the dust settled, but at that moment she came down to see what progress I was making, and immediately told me not to damage that plank, as she was sure her great-grandfather had placed it there with his own hands. I tried to explain just how fragile it was, and that it was going to revert to dust no matter how gently it was handled. She was adamant — the board must be saved.
I asked my father about it, and he went to take a look at the situation and said that the only way to give her the results she wanted was to construct a wooden framework and remove it that way. This I did, and was able to get it out of the cellar and into a woodshed, where I’m sure it returned to the dust that it had originally come from in short order.
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Unless you had ever seen the inside of her house, it would be impossible for me to describe it to you. There were three rooms on the first floor. One was used as the living room, another of equal size she used for storage, and the kitchen. There was an overabundance of furniture throughout, and in every drawer was packed Lord knows what for contents. Some were full of hairnets, others silk stockings and others with orange peels. She kept everything she ever owned because she had all the hairnets and stockings she ever owned; she told me this once.
The orange peels were another story. She would carefully peel each orange and put the peels in a paper bag until they were completely dry, then would transfer them into a drawer or wooden box. The purpose was that she would always have a supply of kindling in case she needed to build a fire. Actually, they really are excellent for starting fires, although not in the volume she had.
The funny thing is that one cool day in the autumn, she asked me to start a fire in the fireplace, and as there was a stuffed-full drawer within arm’s length, I removed a few and was almost ready to put a match to them when Betsy emerged from the other room and nearly had a batch of hairless kittens when she saw what I was about to do. I told her that she had told me that’s what they were intended for, and she replied: “Yes, but only in an emergency!�
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The room adjacent to the living room was piled from floor to ceiling with stacks of newspaper. I mean that literally: right up to the 7-foot, 3-inch ceiling. There were two paths that wound their way through them if, for some reason, you decided to go there at all.
One year, while she was in Florida for the winter, she had asked my father to paint the kitchen ceiling. We went up there, cleared away as much junk as we could and prepared to paint. Because there were so many hundreds of newspapers in the next room, he decided to use a few of them instead of using a regular drop cloth. This we did, and the clean up went well, with the newspapers safely burned to destroy the evidence. When she arrived in the spring, don’t you know that the first thing she did was berate my poor father for using some of her blessed newspapers. She somehow knew which ones had been taken. We didn’t use all that many and had taken a few from several piles to make it less obvious, but it didn’t work!
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She had somewhat of a mean streak, although I doubt that she would have defined it as such. One day she wanted to cash a check and wanted it cashed at her bank in Winsted. As usual, she had begun departure operations in the morning with most of her movements directed toward the goal of arriving at the bank before the 3 p.m. daily closing. Sometime after 2 p.m. she realized that it would be impossible to make the 9-mile trip before the witching hour.
She then called the bank and asked to speak to the manager. It was explained to him that she had a very important document that she had to have at the bank today and that she wouldn’t be able to arrive there until shortly after 3 p.m. The manager told her that he would stay after hours himself and open up for her when she got there.
Sometime after the closing hour, Betsy showed up at the Mechanics Savings Bank and was let in by the manager. She then proceeded to take the check out of her pocketbook and handed it to him to cash, “because she needed to have some cash around the house, and knew that they wouldn’t remain open just for that, so she had concocted a little fib.�
I wasn’t there, but I am sure the manager wasn’t amused, and her supply of special treatment acts with that bank dried up.
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Her house and the next one, which happened to be the last on the dead-end road, were only a little more than 100 yards apart. One day Oscar Riiska, our rural delivery man, inadvertently left a piece of her “junk mail� in the last post box by mistake. I think they were identical flyers that had somehow become stuck together. The recipient of these took Betsy’s copy down and put it in her box.
Betsy saw this happen and went out to see what was going on. She didn’t say too much as I remember, but apparently went into the house and sent off an irate letter to the Postmaster General in Washington seeking to have Oscar fired and seeking advice as to whether she had a case against her neighbor for being an unauthorized person placing mail in a U. S. post box. I suppose a very quick “investigation� was conducted about Oscar Riiska, but as he was an exemplary carrier and citizen, nothing came of it. It didn’t show itself all the time, but she did have a mean streak.
Bob Grigg is the town historian in Colebrook.
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