Here is a picture of young Margery Mosher, long before we got to know her when she had become Margery Anonson, married to the local Ford dealer, Ernie Anonson, a taciturn man of few words.

 

She grew up in the small Iowa town of Riceville where her parents owned the "dry goods" store. You could buy shoes, dresses, fabrics, undergarments, gifts, blouses, scarves, linens, handkerchiefs, jewelry -- just about anything "dry."

​

She was our "cousin" technically, but she was more like an aunt. Anyway, we just called her Margie.

 

Every summer there was the thrill of taking the train from Minneapolis by ourselves or with a sibling, then being picked up by Margie at the little Riceville train station. Margie would spoil us rotten and give us the run of what we thought was a mansion, a house made of thick brick walls, laid one home-made brick atop the other by our great-grandfather, James Fellows, a mason. It was fashioned after houses in Boston, where James grew up, and it even had a "captain's walk" on the roof, where, of course, instead of espying a ship's sails coming into harbor, one would see fields of corn or the nearby woods.

​

In the months it took James to build the house, the family lived in an old log cabin he had built previously. The family never took that log cabin down after the main house was built, though in time it must have rotted from within pretty badly because we kids were never allowed to go inside it -- that is, if we could have even entered it.

 

Margie had sorrows in her life, and this photo seems to presage it. Her first husband, Dr. Tom Stewart, must have been a wonderful man who died too young. She rarely spoke of him but kept a photo of him on her dresser, a smiling man in a dapper suit and straw hat.

​

Her only sibling, Phillip, committed suicide under mysterious circumstances while Out West following WWII. The manner of his death was a family "shame" that had been kept from us kids until we were adults.