Reminisce In a magazine called Reminisce, Cora Owen writes about her childhood during the Depression as she was growing up on Five Islands. (Photo Paula Gibbs)

Cora Owen, poet, preacher, and writer, remembers well how she and her two brothers and little sisters lightened their father's load 70 years ago this Thanksgiving.

Owen, who now lives on the Old Sheepscot Road in Wiscasset, has a story in a national magazine about her childhood days growing up poor, as most people were during the Depression, on Five Islands. The magazine is "Reminisce, The Magazine That Brings Back The Good Times," which has one million subscribers across the country, according to a press release from the publisher of the magazine.

"I wrote the story 35 years ago, and sent it away, but it was never published," Owen said this week. She said she came across the story again last spring and decided to send it to the magazine, which includes no advertisements and is totally supported by subscriptions.

She says she's known about the magazine for years. "This is a magazine that appeals to young and old," she said.

She said she was called by a representative of the magazine, and told her story would appear in the November/December issue. Photographs she submitted of her mother and father, Thomas and Lulu Hanna, and a picture of her with her sister Mary Frances with her two brothers, Irving and Tom, are included in the one-page story.

The story tells about the four children who were gathered around the kitchen table in late November of 1934, singing hymns.

"Poor in quality, we compensated with enthusiasm and volume," the story says.

"Dad sat listening to our concert, discouragement and anxiety on his face," the story continues. "Those were the terrible mid-Depression years. Unemployed, and in poor health, he worried about the fast-approaching Thanksgiving Day. There would be no special dinner for his family. How could he tell us?"

The story continues as the children were start singing a hymn called "Brighten the Corner Where You Are," and there is a knock at the door. The rest of the story unfolds, and ends with, "Together, we brightened a corner of my father's troubled heart."

Owen was only 16 years old when her father died suddenly, leaving her, her sister, and by this time, six brothers without a father, and her mother a widow at the age of 35. Help through those hard times was provided from relatives and others in the close-knit community of Five Islands where her great grandfather, Hirman Rowe, and her grandfather, Lermond Rowe, were postmasters.

"Sometimes there was nothing for Christmas," she remembers.

"I remember one year when my mother cut up something and made an apron out of it. She took an old coat and made mittens out of it for my two brothers I didn't really think about the sacrifice behind it at the time."

"We practically grew up on beans," she said, a staple that was nourishing and inexpensive. "And corn chowder, homemade biscuits and macaroni and cheese.

She and her sister and brothers attended school in a one room school house which is now a fire station, she says. One of her favorite memories is coming home after school and walking into the house to smell molasses cookies baking.

"I still have the recipe, but they just don't taste as good as my mother's," she says.

Fun for the kids in the neighborhood was sliding on a hill near the house, and on another, bigger hill called Bowling Alley hill.

"We'd pick up our sleds, then run, and plunk down on it. Then we'd gather at the ice pond and build a fire out of old tires. We didn't skate because we couldn't afford skates, but we had fun with the other kids."

"I was a Tom boy. We used to play scrub ball. Each one had a turn at bat, and I could bat as well as any boy."

In the spring the kids would hang May baskets on the door knobs of other people's houses, then yell, "May basket, May basket," and run and hide.

Many of her childhood memories are in the nearly 13,000 - yes, 13,000 - poems she has written during her nearly 80 years of life. She wrote her first poem when she was nine. About 750 of her poems have been published.

"I average about 100 poems a month," she says. She has 34 more poems to write to reach 13,000, she says. She used a rhyming dictionary given to her by her grandmother until it fell apart. She has all of her poems indexed by subject matter, with topics like love, joy, prayer, praise and Thanksgiving, faith and trusting, hope, peace, time, and families.

She often wrote poems about her two boys, Gordon Pinkham, who lives next door to her, and Gary Pinkham, who lives in Boothbay.

Just as she has been known for her poems and stories, her second husband, Lyman Owen, was a photographer whose postcards have literally gone around the world. One of his more famous postcards is of the schooners Hesper and Luther Little, which sat on the Wiscasset waterfront from the 1930s until 1998.

A member of the Bible Baptist Church in Wiscasset, she has been a lay preacher for over 60 years, and leads a weekly Bible study in her home.

"I'm always talking," she says. "My mother always said I was born talking. The Lord has made use of my gift of gab."