Meeting Place

On Tuesday we visited the Meeting Place adult day care center in Newport, and for one hour spent time talking with some of the people who hang out there. Ben and I talked with a woman named Margery. She was about 65, born in Barton, VT, lived most of her life in Orleans, and has been coming to the meeting place for about a year. In her younger years she worked in a factory assembling table saws and also ran a dairy farm with her husband. Later on she worked for a hotel in Newport cleaning rooms. She had a son, but he died in the late 90's, and her husband died in '03. She has no other relatives in the area. That was about all the information we could get out of her. She seemed lucid enough to understand our questions but did not seem to want to talk that much. Most of the answers we did receive were just one word. It seems that barriers keep coming up that prevent us from getting useful information. Perhaps the two places we have visited were not the best places to find good informants.