ANNIE MOORE – A Woman Ahead Of The Times.

By Ben Robicheau~brobicheau@cogeco.ca
It seems to me that whenever anyone mentioned Annie Moore they always used her full name. I never heard anyone call her Mrs. Moore or just Annie unless they were talking to her. If they were talking about her it was always Annie Moore. I’m not sure why this was so because as far as I can remember, she was the only Annie on the Island, so there was no danger of being unclear as to who it was you were talking about. Besides, the community had a well-established system for avoiding identity problems, if two women had the same first name at least one of them would have her name spliced to her husband’s first name. This was the case with Alma-Wally, who lived on the back road beside the new school, and of course there was also Edna-Fred who lived across the lane from Edna Bowers, so it was pretty obvious where confusion could arise there.
Possibly people thought Annie required a bigger name because she had a bigger personality than most. I remember her as being a tallish, raw-boned kind of woman, with her face and hands always looking red and weathered. She usually wore a long tweed coat and sturdy walking shoes or boots depending on how muddy the road over the High Knoll was that day. For some reason she liked to come visit my mother on Mondays, which was laundry day. I can still see her in our kitchen, sitting on a wooden chair amid the steam and soapsuds from the wringer washer and the washtubs of wet clothes. Even in the heat of the kitchen, she’d usually be all bundled up in her hat and coat and chatting away at my mother on the busiest day of the week. And when Annie chatted you paid attention! She tended to talk in a very loud voice, possibly the result of living next door to a foghorn for a good part of her life.
For many years Annie and her husband Fred were the keepers of the Northern Light. Fred had a car from the early 40s; a Hudson Super Six that was his pride and joy. He kept it in great shape and after he passed away several people offered to buy it. Annie wouldn’t sell and kept it stored away in the garage; she had never learned to drive despite living at an isolated end of the Island a couple of miles from her nearest neighbour. A year or so after Fred died she had Stanley Moore take the car up to a field across from Daniel Kenny’s barn, lock the doors and leave it there. The car slowly deteriorated over time and eventually was bulldozed into the ground, I guess she couldn’t stand to see anyone else driving her husband’s baby.
After Fred got too sick to drive, at least once a week Annie would walk several miles from Northern Point to my father’s store across from the ferry wharf to do her grocery shopping. Occasionally, if the weather was bad or she had an extra large order, she would accept a ride home or have her groceries delivered, but for the most part she would have her supplies packed into a cardboard box tied up with twine and then carry them home herself. She was always very particular about the box, it had to be sturdy with the top flaps still attached; the boxes that cans of Carnation Milk came in were perfect for the job, being strong and the right size. My father usually cut the tops off of the boxes when unpacking the freight, but would keep a few good boxes intact just for Annie. The twine had to be strong also because that’s what she used to carry the box; it must have been hard on the fingers toting a box full of groceries all the way back home.
Eventually, after Fred died, Annie moved from Northern Point, I don’t know if it was her own decision, or if the Government forced her out. It’s possible that they thought a woman couldn’t operate a lighthouse on her own even though Annie had been doing just that for a couple of years while Fred was bedridden and for another year or more since his death. In any case, she moved into town, but just barely. She bought the last house on the very edge of the village, the one closest to Northern Point.
My father had offered to move her and when he arrived at the lighthouse he was surprised to see all of those Carnation boxes again. She had hundreds of them, all neatly tied up with the carrying string and filled with empty tin cans and glass bottles and jars. My father said that for every truckload of furniture he hauled, he hauled three more of boxes. I don’t think anyone knows for sure why she had been saving all this stuff for so long. Dad thinks that maybe she got into the habit during the Second World War when everybody saved everything so it could be recycled for the War Effort and she just never gave it up. Whatever the reason, by the time she was moved into her new home, a good part of it was taken up with boxes.
Annie rarely let anyone into her house, I occasionally delivered her groceries and was always instructed to leave them outside the door. I did get inside on one occasion, probably ten years or so after the move, when she was having trouble with her kitchen stove and asked me in to look at it. It appeared to me that she was living in just two rooms, the crowded kitchen was her living area and I could see that what had probably been the dining room now had a bed in it. The former living room looked to be mostly full of boxes and stacks of old newspapers and I assume the other five or six rooms in the big old house must have been full too.
It wasn’t just tin and glass that Annie stockpiled. She also scoured the beach for driftwood to be hauled home and cut up for firewood. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see her, probably into her 70’s by now, wrestling a four-foot stick of pulpwood up over the breastwork. Many people won’t burn driftwood; it’s usually wet and the salt in the wood will eventually rust out the bottom of your stove. But Annie had a system to minimise this problem. She piled the newly salvaged wood in her back yard for a year or so to let the rain and snow wash away most of the salt, then it was cut and split and stacked outside for another year, then she finally moved it into an old barn she had on the property. By the time she was ready to burn it, the wood was well dried and mostly salt free. Over the years her woodpile grew and grew, the barn was eventually filled to the rafters. In fact, it was so full that I think it was only the wood stacked inside that kept the decrepit old building from falling down. When the barn wouldn’t hold any more, she stacked it in the yard in neat circular piles. The last few years she lived in the house, I’m not sure she even burned wood anymore, I know that at some point she had an oil stove installed in the kitchen. But she kept on hauling home wood off the beach and piling it up in her yard. I think that, like the cans and bottles, collecting driftwood was a habit she found impossible to break; she just couldn’t bear to see all that firewood go to waste.
Annie Moore may have been considered an eccentric person by some, but as is the case in many small communities, the people of Brier Island knew that there was more to her than her sometimes-unusual behaviour and accepted her for what she was. In fact, she could be considered a woman ahead of the times. She lived a good part of her life as an independent woman, relying on her own resources and efforts to support herself, living life on her own terms. And long before anyone else started talking about saving the environment by reducing, recycling and reusing, Annie Moore was already doing it.