Betty Firth

Six days after the election, feeling baffled about the results and uncertain about the future, I turned to a dear friend for her wisdom. Mary Alice Harvey, 98 years old, was a Quaker in utero, her parents having attended a Quaker meeting for the first time two months before she was born. She grew up nurtured and influenced by Quakers, developing into a woman who lived a life of activism, embodying the values she holds dear. In the 1950s, she and husband Harvey chose to live in an African American neighborhood in St. Paul, protested real estate redlining, and boycotted businesses that would not hire African Americans. She attended every city council and school board meeting in whatever community she lived in. One of her most satisfying activities was helping people study for their citizenship test in Duluth from 1990-2020 – for 30 years, until she was 94 years old! She taught them about her favorite topics: American history, civics, and how government works in a democracy. She took them to city council meetings, where they saw that people could stand up and voice their opinions freely. They were fascinated and did not take these anticipated freedoms for granted. Mary Alice said, laughing, “Council meetings were always good entertainment. If you take them too seriously, you get to feeling too bad.”
I met her 40 years ago at People Camp, a family camp sponsored by Friends for a Non-Violent World, and she has been impressing me ever since. She loved to walk and explore her environment, forest or woodland, lakeside or prairie, and often could outlast me. I love to plumb her rich trove of memories, which she delights in sharing.
Her home is now with her daughter and son-in-law on the St. Louis River, where she can enjoy the wildlife that roams, swims, and flies nearby. She speaks of them fondly, like old friends whose habits are well known. Mary Alice grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota with no electricity or running water. The family cooked on a woodburning stove, which she prefers to modern stoves. “I felt like I had more control. If it was too hot, you put in more fuel or opened the damper. If you wanted to slow the cooking down, you just moved it to the back of the stove.”
Her family of origin grew most of their food, plowing with two of the three horses they owned. The third one was a relief hitter, rotating in for plow or wagon duty in the fields when one of the others needed to take a break or pulling the smaller plow and cultivator for the kitchen garden. Mary Alice said, “We couldn’t afford a buggy, but our neighbors had one, and they would share. Their horse was so gentle that as a five year old, I could crawl under its belly and buckle the buckles on the harness.”
When Mary Alice was about twelve, one neighbor, a young man, bought a tractor. Her mom lamented, “That’s not a good thing. He has headlights on it.” That sounded like an improvement to me, but Mary Alice explained, “With headlights, he could work into the night. When you have horses, you have to stop when it gets dark. You also have to take five or ten minutes at the end of the row to let them rest in the shade and take a full hour for lunch to give them a break, a better pace for humans and horses.”
Her mom made their own bread, six loaves at a time, and the kids loved to help, carrying their love of bread making into their future lives. She mused about so many things she had learned growing up that were necessary for daily living and self-sufficiency, such as lighting a kerosene lamp, harnessing a horse, planting a garden, canning the produce, operating a wood stove, sewing, knitting, and managing an outhouse. She wondered if many people had maintained or reclaimed these skills, and I assured her that it was one of things that attracted me to live here: lots of people still know how to do things, how to use their hands, and how to be self-sufficient, at least in some aspects of their lives.
In the late 90s, I had grown weary of the urban clamor I was surrounded by in the Twin Cities, and I looked to the North where I’d learned to sail on Lake Superior, and had felt my breathing deepen and relax, even on the drive up. A new century was on the horizon bringing forecasts of possible calamities with the Y2K bug wreaking havoc on computer systems. It wasn’t a driving force behind my decision, but I knew that if systems did malfunction or collapse, I’d rather be among people who knew how to chop wood, fetch water, and use a wood stove. And I loved the idea of being in a small town where I could get to know people I would see in my daily rounds, shedding the anonymity of the city.
After 25 years, I still love it for those reasons. I’ve made friends and become acquainted with many people who value what we have here, including people who think differently than I do about some important issues. I left the Minneapolis Friends Meeting behind, found the Duluth-Superior Friends and was delighted to reconnect with Mary Alice.
When I asked her advice for those of us who are feeling concerned about what’s ahead in our country and our world with Trump on the loose, she said, “Work locally, with your school board and city council. Focus on issues important to you. You can’t do it all––you’ll drive yourself crazy if you try.”
“Keep grounded with people you know and in your own neighborhood. It’s good to have people you can count on and who count on you. First thing in the morning, do some stretches, yoga, if you like. Get some fresh air. Take a walk. Say your morning prayers. It gets your day started right. Find one or two things every day to laugh about. That helps. And be kind.”
Pretty darned good advice, eh? It sure seems to have worked for her.