Albion is in Orleans County, one of the poorest counties in New York State. And in the poorest of counties, the poorest of people came from West Virginia, though the reason for their northern migration was unclear. Perhaps they’d simply followed the eastern tip of Lake Erie up through Pennsylvania till it washed them to the southern shore of Lake Ontario where they could go no further. Or else they came to pull fruit from freckled branches, to cut the blue-green balls of cabbage that grew in lines close to the earth. Or maybe they knew something special about the place, some secret or well-disguised potential.
Mrs. Drake was a West Virginian, and moved into the upstairs apartment after it was vacated by the woman who’d worn her sadness like a perfume. Mrs. Drake was old. A clutch of nappy gray hairs sprang from her head so that she looked like a dandelion gone to seed. Small as a girl, Mrs. Drake had a voice that sounded like the yellow paper I helped scrape from her worn kitchen walls. She repapered the small room with my mother’s collection of newspapers from the day JFK had been killed. My mother, shocked at seeing the headlines she’d been saving glued to walls, couldn’t make sense of Mrs. Drake’s crazy ways. She saw her as a bug of a woman. But I was mystified. Nothing was off limits to Mrs. Drake, not someone else’s belongings, not the eating of weeds, not indelicate bits of personal advice. That was her main appeal.
“Listen up, baby—you ever getcha an ear infection, jes’ get yourself some sheep’s urine, soak it up with cotton balls, an’ stuff the whole mess up inta your ear—it’ll clear things out in no time.”
Mrs. Drake picked wildflowers from the field out back and boiled them into remedies. For Christmas, she gave each of us four girls a smooth-handled wooden mirror. She served hot tea and told stories while teaching me to braid a long line of yarn with a stubby crochet hook.