Oct 31, 2010 / 11:04 am
San Marcos resident Aurora Albright remembers spending lazy, berry-picking summers at her grandparents’ two-story farmhouse in AuSable Forks, N.Y.
Each season, she would help feed the chickens and pigs and try not to eat more berries than she picked. Since she lived in the city, the summers spent with her “Ma-mere” and “Pa-pere” opened her eyes to the nonstop labor involved in living on a farm.
Her hardworking grandparents didn’t own a washing machine and had no indoor plumbing. Her grandfather, Frederick Akey, always “walked funny” and her grandmother, Laura Akey, had a rosary or a missal in her hand at all times, Albright remembered. The religious couple raised 10 children in the rural town near the Canadian border.
Each adolescent summer before Albright moved to California at age 18, she would listen to stories that her grandfather would tell about Brother Andre Bessette and how he healed her very own “Pa-pere.”