Miss Katie Fitter –

I’ll never forget Miss Katie Fitter. I was born on her birthday, and to her that was even better than having a namesake. For years she sent me a birthday card every year with an original poem in it she had written.  She was very talented - once she had been a schoolteacher. I wish I still had her poems, but they were destroyed when my house burned.

Miss Katie was born about 1890, the youngest of seven children – not really such a large family in those days, for a good Catholic family. Her family was close neighbors to my grandparents – their farm was only a mile and a half away if you took the section line roads, less than a mile if you followed the pasture fence – which Miss Katie often did in her little Model T Ford roadster with the rumble seat. She kept it in perfect running order until 1950, when the local Ford dealer talked her into trading it in on a brand new 1950 Ford sedan, which she drove until the day she died in the late 70s. We often wondered if the dealer gave her what it was worth, for it was a classic even then.

Miss Katie had undoubtedly been a pretty young woman – her hair was black and even in her sixties only sprinkled with gray. She cut it herself - who could spend hard-earned dollars in a beauty shop? – in a straight page boy with straight bangs.  By the fifties she only had two or three teeth in her mouth, but she still smiled a joyous smile when company came. As far as I know, she never had a special “fella.”

Her six brothers and sisters had all grown and married and begun families of their own, but Miss Katie had only been out of college and teaching a few years when her aging mother and father required constant care. Miss Katie was the one who had to go home to the farm and do it, by default. She never complained or resented it.

When mama and papa passed on, for some reason Miss Katie just stayed on the farm. She should have been able to teach – her mind was still sharp as a tack - she listened to the radio and read the newspapers. The house itself was weathered and gray, sandblasted free from it’s confining white paint. The inside was cluttered, but never dirty. She always kept the same overstuffed furniture her folks had bought at about the turn of the century. She just didn’t choose to leave. 

She always had a dog or two on the place with her, but what she really missed, really craved, was human company and conversation. She went to church every Sunday in that Model T. She visited the neighbors as often as seemed proper, but hardly anyone ever visited her. When someone did make the eight-and-a-half mile drive out into the country, they always complained that they couldn’t get away from her. She was, I must admit, adroit at not letting anyone end a conversation.

Many’s the time I went there with my parents, and heard one of them caution the other, “For heaven’s sake, don’t get out of the car – we’ll never get home in time for supper.” Then an hour or so later we’d be driving away slowly with Miss Katie walking along beside the car still talking, reaching through the window, touching – always gently, never demanding, just needing the contact with fellow humans. 

From beautiful young lady, to bright young scholar, to dutiful daughter, to lonely old woman – what fate chose this life path for Miss Katie Fitter?

ANOTHER LITTLE OLD LADY STORY

Miss Moira Proctor –

Miss Moira wasn’t born blind; she was blinded by a simple childhood illness – some kind of fever. She was born about 1885. She was a soft, round little old lady with a pleasant smile and gentle hands. She was a dear friend of my grandmother’s. They went to the Baptist Church together.

Miss Moira was amazing.  It was almost as though she had sight in her fingers. She could run her fingers through your hair, and tell you what color your hair was. She could pass her hands over your face and tell you if your skin was rosy or pale or tan. She could rub the cloth of your dress between her fingers and tell you what color it was. I never saw her make a mistake. 

Because she and I both spent so much time at my grandmother’s, I grew up watching her do these things, and was only surprised that other blind people couldn’t do the same things. When I was older she visited in several of my school classes, and the kids were amazed that she could do them.

She was always sweet, never complaining, enthusiastic about life. Her touch, as she determined the color of your hair or skin or garment, was never invasive or offensive. Just gentle, seeking, almost calming in some special way.

I would look at her and my grandmother, very much alike in stature and demeanor – plump, gray haired, gentle, quiet, yet appreciative of life, and wondered at the one difference I could see. My sighted grandmother had a sense of herself as old. She had married a man twenty-three years older than herself – they had been married about thirty years when he died. She was relegated to the role of widow before her time, and she settled into that. Miss Moira’s last visual memory of herself was as a girl of about ten, and you always had the sense that that was how she saw herself – not immature in any way, just young of heart and young of spirit.