“I think that I shall never see. A poem lovely as a tree …” Montague loved the old rock maple on the grounds of the Farren. The peoples’ insistence that Joyce Kilmer was inspired by their tree and no other locale’s tree was written up in 1988 by the Associated Press. Like the tree, Farren Hospital is no more. But there are our memories.
What memories did this place inspire? I ask myself. I ask my friends. I ask my late mother’s friends. I even check the archives. I ask all, “why is this place, the Farren, so special, so loved?”
My generation recalls the kindness and competence of the Sisters of Providence whose mission the Farren was. They were everywhere. Heading up the lab and the pharmacy, giving physical therapy, ministering to patients. It was 1960 and a Sister was administering an injection of a Sulfa drug to the bottom of a three-year-old girl who was recovering from a ruptured appendix. I remember the stiff white fabric covering her forehead, her veil, and her long black habit with rosary beads worn at her waist. They clicked when she walked. She approached with confidence the bed where I lay on my tummy. She was carrying a syringe with a huge needle! I hated that Sister.
Then there was another three-year-old girl, Mary, accompanying her father on rounds … unless things got too serious. Then the good doctor sat her up on the Coke machine to wait. When rounds were prolonged, Sister Superior would swoop up the little girl for a trip to Sister’s office … for coloring. Sister Superior was “an imposing woman, very commanding.” Mary recalls that Sister “always had a box or two of chocolates in her file cabinet, (top drawer). If I was good, I got to pick one. If I was very good, I could pick two. I almost always got two … I loved that nun.”
It was the arm of a Sister of Providence behind the ether mask as the patient counted backwards 100, 99, 98. A ninety-something-year-old remembers her nursing days working in “Med-Surg.” She says that she was very happy there. She reminded me that in more recent years there had been a Saturday evening Mass in the Farren’s St. Francis of Assisi Chapel. Folks from Montague City packed the small chapel. Light brought to life its beautiful stained-glass windows.
My late mother, Phyllis, shared with me more than once, a sad story from when she worked in the delivery room in the 1950s. The stillborn, she had told me, was a “beautiful boy”. Then there was the time when my mother greeted the laboring mother who, my mother said, “I thought I didn’t know.” “Oh!” said the patient, “you were here for my other deliveries!” Such is life in a small community hospital.
Like the maple tree, the Farren Hospital is no more. Like the maple, the Farren had a long life of service to Montague. Mother Mary of Providence sat on the Farren’s first board of trustees. In the 1890s, this founder of the Sisters of Providence traveled widely seeking out the best nursing practices. For example, she traveled to Chicago to observe an operation by Dr. Mayo. She wrote in her memoir that her Sisters administered ether just as it was administered in his operating room.
It was Mimi’s mother, a nurse trained by the Sisters, who was with me when I had complications from a tonsillectomy at age eight. That was the mid-1960s. The jack-hammering for the foundation of the “new wing” was right below my window. There was no rest for that little girl.
Speaking of noise, Mimi recalls another day in the 1960s when skate boards were new. She and other neighborhood kids were behind the old hospital watching a boy trying out his skateboard on the ramp while the others watched … when suddenly there appeared a Sister coming from the offices towards them. Mimi recalls that their surprise turned to amazement when Sister (the new hospital administrator, oops!) asked to try the skateboard of one of the boys! Mimi recalls that “Sister then sped off down the long ramp!”
I ask again…Is there “A poem lovely as a tree?” Maybe. Maybe a memory.
Louise Boucher Croll lives in South Hadley.