My earliest memories were of her sending my sister Mary and me to pick blueberries up a mountain path in New Hampshire, and of her raking snow off our second story window sill to make ice dessert by putting milk and sugar on the snow.

Annie Abraham came to New Hampshire from Lebanon and got a job in the cotton mills and lived with her family who came before her. Her name in Lebanese is "Hunnie." I guess the closest English equivalent would be Hannah, like Hannah from Savannah.

A year after moving South, we moved to the farm on Hopkins Street where Derenne School now sits. Our farm was a truck farm or vegetable farm. We raised all kinds of vegetables which my father sold to the stores and wholesale produce houses. This was hard work and it was year round. If it wasn't for momma, we never would have made it. Talk about pioneer women! She worked in the fields, gathered produce, cut wood, milked cows, fed the chickens, made clothes and cooked, besides her regular work.

Boy! Could she cook! She could not read or write but somebody had to borrow her recipes. Otherwise how else could you account for all those "Near and Middle East" recipes in the papers the young-uns are discovering now. And when she starts baking bread and pastries; she would drive the natives crazy. The neighbors on each side of us had a well-worn path through our gardens and tall grass to our back door. Momma never turned anyone away.

We were poor but we were rich. The house was cold in winter, but we were warm because of momma.

Momma taught my sister to cook and she in turn taught her daughters. They say that a craftsman's work bears testimony to him. Momma was not only a craftsman, but an artist and her daughter and grand-daughters pay tribute to her in their own handwork.

For seven years we lived in a shanty house that would be condemned today. I was describing to someone this house the other day. I invited that person to go with me for a Sunday drive and we went as far as Springfield and I didn't find one house that would match ours for its deplorable condition. It leaked all over; it had no inside walls except for single walled partitions and no ceilings. There was one inside door and the outside doors were all barn doors. The heat was provided by a wood stove and a fireplace. We studied by the fireplace and a kerosene lamp. And the plumbing - that consisted of a shallow well pump in the back yard; a bucket of water on the back porch with a wash basin and a one hole "John" through the back gate and down the path. A #3 tub by the kitchen stove was our "Jacuzzi" and momma made all this a home for us.

Momma made yogurt, cheese, butter and bread. She prepared meals from produce too ripe or too large to be sold. She sent us off to school, sometimes after feeding us a bowl of rice cooked with milk and syrup. Sometimes for a treat, we got raisins in it.

Daddy brought home only the necessary items we did not raise - flour, rice, salt, pepper, spices, olives, raisins, olive oil and sometimes a special treat of hot dogs or stew beef, round steak or candy.

We raised our own cane for syrup and a sheep or two, like people who raised a hog or two to butcher in the fall, however, we butchered in the spring. It was "hog killing" and momma would prepare all kinds of goodies from every part of the sheep.

And the other Lebanese families and relatives were invited, and there would be a feast and laughter and singing and dancing and we would sit up past midnight outside under the stars because there was no room inside and the men had their arrak and hors d'ouvres and kibbi and they told us kids stories about Lebanese and Arab heroes and about Untur and his horse.

We had food but we didn't have clothes because we didn't have money. Daddy brought home meal sacks and momma saved feed sacks from printed material and sugar sacks and she made slips, pillow cases and dresses and sheets out of them. You'd wake up in the morning and read "Sugar 100 lbs." - Heavy man! And our shoes - we all had alligator shoes because the soles left the uppers and they opened and shut when we walked.

When we didn't fill the wood boxes, momma would cut wood like a man so she could cook for us five children because when we got home from school, we had to work in the fields with daddy; momma worked in the fields, too. When we got home we would find our meals prepared and she would be in the field with daddy. Many times when crops needed to be gathered she would be in the fields working by moonlight. I have seen her work picking okra by moonlight until the tips of her fingers bled even with gloves on - the fingertips of the gloves would wear out.

When daddy opened the grocery store in 1925 and we moved into the house he built, momma managed the store. We helped run it after school and on Saturdays and helped daddy on the farm. Momma would run the store, cook, sew, wash clothes and iron. We would get up at 6 o'clock and momma would have her clothes hung on the line. She had been washing clothes half the night.

When saw mill hands and the neighbors came in to buy on credit, she would keep tally in her head and when we came home from school, we would sit behind the counter and she would recite from memory the person's name, what he bought and the amount and we'd post them in the ledger. Although they all liked momma, it's a pity not all paid us because we have a cigar box full of index cards of those who didn't.

When she was growing up in Lebanon, they say she could ride a horse bare back better than any boy and that was something because boys were taught to ride before they could walk. She was racing a boy once and her horse stumbled and she fell and broke her arm. It was crooked when it healed, but that didn't stop her. She always could do more than an average man with one arm tied behind her back.

If a Christian could be Kosher, momma was orthodox. Once when Polly went to the family store and got a bunch of collards and asked momma for a piece of fat back, momma said, "What you gonna do with that, chile?" Polly said, "I'm gonna fix Tony some supper." Momma said, "Chile, we don't eat that!"

Momma came to the United States from a far country, Lebanon, which was at that time part of Syria. She came to better herself and flee from the Ottoman Turkish oppression that had subdued and slaughtered the Christians for over 400 years. Her forefathers and family had suffered and died through 1918 and the politics of that region was not kind to the native Christians. She came here at the beginning of the century, married my father and when her first daughter was born, went back to visit her mother-in-law and her kinfolk. When she started to return, my grandmother begged her to leave my sister with her to raise and be a comfort to her in her old age. The war broke out and the Turks became quite oppressive and cut off food supplies because the Lebanese were pro-allies. Many of the people including my grandmother and sister starved to death. Relatives told us later that people would go outside after a rain to gather snails, stoop over to pick them up, fall into the water and drown because they were so weak from hunger.

Mother was no stranger to hardship and tragedy. She was proud. She was talking to me once when things were tough and she said, "Son, we don't ask for welfare." I have never seen my father bring an ounce of surplus commodity or seen a welfare check or handout in our house.

But tragedy followed her. When World War II broke out, our brother George was a war casualty. Mother grieved for him a year and a half. I think this is what brought on a stroke which finally killed her.

I came home from work one day and she was in the store. I sat down beside her and put my head in her lap and began talking to her with concern. She put her hand on my head and said, "Son, don't you fret about me. I'm not afraid to die." And so it was. And that's how I remember my mother.