Blodgett - Pierce Family --- Family Stories
Aunt Abbie
by Barbara (Blodgett) Vannier
Aunt Abbie was a lady of many talents and she used all of them. Her creativity showed up
in everything she did. She could make something out of whatever material was at hand.
She was educated as a teacher and she did teach in an Indian school for a while.
Aunt Abbie was aunt to everybody. Everybody called her "Aunt Abbie". But she was really
my aunt. She was my mother's sister. She was married to my father's brother, Uncle Warren.
That made their children and my parents' children double cousins. This is an unusual
occurrence for most families, but it happened several times in our family.
Most of the children in my mother's family played musical instruments. Mother and Aunt Abbie
played mandolins for years. One brother played a cello and the other one played jazz piano.
Later Mother played a violin and Aunt Abbie played a vibraphone, which is like a marimba,
except that it has metal keys instead of wooden ones. It is played with four mallets and
Aunt Abbie played it well.
Aunt Abbie's specialty all her life was crafts of all kinds - dolls, rugs, ceramics,
she even made things out of wood. When I was in about the sixth grade, she invited me
to spend a few days with her and Uncle Warren. She and I each made a cloth doll. She
had made patterns for the body and long arms and legs. We cut them out, sewed them
and stuffed them. Then we sewed the arms and legs to the bodies. Finally we painted
the faces, sewed on the yarn hair and made beautiful clothes. I thought I had had a
wonderful time and I had a lovely doll, too.
Aunt Abbie not only made dolls, she collected them, too. Her collection became newsworthy
in our town and a photographer came to take a picture of her and the collection for the
local newspaper. Even though she gave many dolls away to the hospital and organizations
that took care of children, the collection became unmanageable for her, so she finally
donated it to the local library.
Uncle Warren collected first-edition books. Aunt Abbie, using more of her creative ability,
made slip-covers for all of them. Dining room bookshelves were filled with these books in
their slip-covers.
Aunt Abbie and Uncle Warren lived a large rambling old farm house that had been in the
family for many years. Although it was originally a farm, the town had grown out past
the house, so that it was now in the town.
The minute you walked into her house, you could tell that a woman of many interests lived
there. No matter where you looked there was some kind of a project in progress. She made
toys of all kinds to give to children at Christmas and she inspired others to help her make
many boxes of toys to be delivered to a children's hospital in a nearby town at Christmas.
She also made braided rugs to give to friends and relatives.
For many years Aunt Abbie did ceramics. She even had a kiln their house. The kiln and the
clay she used were so heavy that the floor under that part of the house had to be reinforced.
Aunt Abbie invited children and friends to come there to make things of clay. She had molds
of animals, flowers, doll heads and countless other things which she could use to help people
make whatever they wanted. Connected to the living room was the ceramics room where there was
a table and many shelves all filled with finished pieces and enticing things to work with.
Whenever she walked to town, she carried with her a plastic bag, a whisk-broom and a dustpan
with which she cleaned up broken glass and debris from the sidewalk as she went. It was about
a mile into town and she went two or three times a week.
Aunt Abbie also liked to travel. She and Uncle Warren went on most of the trips around the
country with Uncle Clyde and my mother and dad (see Trips after the Harvest). She made a
ceramic plate to commemorate these trips, showing the routes of several of their trips
around the country on a map of the United States.
When my daughter, Jean and her husband, Mario lived in Mexico, I wanted to go to visit them.
Since neither my husband nor my mother could go with me at the time, I invited Aunt Abbie
to go with me. She was then 76. While we were there we went to Mexico City and from there
to Teotihuacan, which is a huge pre-Aztec site with massive stepped pyramids and many stone
carvings.
Teotihuacan required a lot of walking, but Aunt Abbie kept up with the rest of us. She had
no trouble, even when, after missing the last bus back to Mexico City, all four of us started
walking back with Mario thumbing a ride. Not one of us was the type who would miss the last bus
from a historic site back to civilization, but somehow there we were - after dark, in a foreign
country, responsible for Aunt Abbie - HITCH-HIKING !!! Unbelievably, very soon a lone driver
came along, who had room for four passengers. Mario sat with him in the front and they talked
in Spanish all the way back to Mexico City. The three generations of mute ladies sat in the back.
The man delivered us right back to our hotel. What a remarkable bit of luck !!!
Aunt Abbie liked to receive letters so she wrote lots of letters because she knew she would get
an answer to every one. Sometimes she would slip a poem she had written in with a letter. For
some unknown reason I began saving her letters in 1971. From then until September, 1993, the
pile grew to be about four inches high.
When her daughter thought Aunt Abbie needed someone nearby to help her if she needed it, she
found a place near her in South Carolina and Aunt Abbie went there to live. She was then in
her late 80's. All her life she had been writing poetry and after she moved to South Carolina,
she began writing more poems and more letters and making more rugs.
Aunt Abbie lived in her own inimitable lifestyle until she was 96.
Abbie (Stone) Blodgett was the daughter of James and Clara (Hall) Stone and
the wife of Warren Blodgett, whose parents were Abram and Jessie (Pierce) Blodgett