My great-grandfather William Norton, who farmed on Leete’s Island, Connecticut more than a century ago, laconically recorded the following highlights for July 30, 1902 in his journal:

Very Hot. Worked at Turnips in the morning then went up to the Lot and worked in the Onions some. Worked at Onions some in the afternoon. Went up Town in the Evening. Went after the Doctor and the nurse, Mrs Upson, got her and got Home at 1/2 Past 8. Etta had a Girl Baby Born about eight o’clock before I got home from Town to night.

That “Girl Baby,” born almost 104 years ago at home without the assistance of a nurse, was my grandmother, Eleanor Ruth Norton — Grammy to me — who passed away peacefully at 8:20 this morning in Chemainus, B.C. Few people my age have grandparents still living and I know how fortunate we were to have had her company for so many years; I will miss her enormously.

The photograph above shows Grammy as she was on graduating from the Hartford Hospital Training School in Connecticut in 1925.

[While in training] I used to wait until the supervisor had made rounds to check for “lights out” at 10:00 p.m., and then would go into my clothes cupboard and write letters, or read for another hour or two. Sometimes several kindred spirits would get together just to have a chin wag. We called ourselves “The Exclusive Owl Society.”

I’ve always loved this image of my grandmother as a young woman, sitting alone in her clothes cupboard late at night, reading and writing letters to her family and friends back home. She was a lovely, natural writer, whose voice came through clearly in her letters; her daughter, my mother, has inherited that gift.

Members of the Exclusive Owl Society, 1925

Many of those letters would have been written to Harry Straw, a widower 19 years her senior with four small children, whom she had met while caring for his cancer-stricken wife in Hartford. Following his wife’s death Harry had returned to Vancouver, writing Eleanor daily letters (as she remembered it, “they were beautiful letters”) which culminated in a proposal of marriage, and in November of her graduating year she set out on the five-day train journey from New Haven to Vancouver where, “on the C.P.R. station platform, I received my first kiss from the man I was to marry three days later.” She was just 23, but had decided, “after much thought and much earnest prayer, that this was what I was meant to do, that this was to be my mission in life.”

Grammy never forgot her roots; she frequently — and proudly — described herself as “a tough old Connecticut Yankee” and she was blessed with good Yankee health throughout her long and happy life.

On Tuesday afternoon J and I took a float plane from Vancouver harbour to Chemainus to have a final visit, and I sat with Grammy and read to her from her memoir An Unusual Life. I read to her about the salt meadows which bordered on Leete’s Island, and about her father being given a bunch of bananas — a rare treat back then — by a truck driver that he’d helped. I reminded her about the view from the window of the upstairs bedroom that she’d shared with Grace, her younger sister: looking out across the meadows towards the Thimble Islands which she had once been allowed to skate around during a winter so cold that even the salt water froze.

There is to be a family reunion of the Norton descendents this coming Saturday at Benton Beach in Connecticut, just one day before Grammy would have celebrated her 104th birthday. She loved the Guilford area enormously: Sachem’s Head, Leete’s Island, the Congregational Church on Guilford green — we were raised on her stories of growing up there.

Grammy used to say that she would like to come back again as a seagull; which is why I will imagine her soaring high above Benton Beach this weekend, quietly observing all the places, and the people, she loved so well.