2. My Mama

I was born on a hot August afternoon in 1877. A year and a half later a baby sister arrived, but soon died of whooping cough. It was in midwinter and the snow was deep. Mama was for burying the baby in the Salem cemetery, a half-mile from “the old home,” but because she was far from well and the roads were deep with snowdrifts, they talked her out of it and buried little Mabel in the well-filled Douglas family lot in Columbia City where there was room for just one more alongside the graves of grandfather and Grandmother Douglas and Mary Douglas (Papa’s first wife) and three children of the first family who had died in infancy.

When spring came, Papa yielded to Mama’s tearful pleadings and the little white coffin was conveyed to the Salem graveyard. It rained all that day. I was taken along on this journey, and claimed later that I remembered being held in Papa’s arms, while somebody sheltered us with an umbrella, as the white coffin was lowered to its final resting place; though I couldn’t have been more than two and a half years old, and Mama thought my precocious “recollection” of this event was the memory of it as told to me when I was at least four or five. But I still have a distinct remembrance of the little white coffin as it sank into the ground; and, for many years, every time I saw the corrugated white enameled inside of the screw-on top of an old-fashioned Mason fruit jar, I was reminded of it. If Daniel Webster could conjugate Latin verbs at four, I see no reason why I should not remember a shockingly impressive scene that had rocked my little world at two and a half.