I was caught up short when Terry said, “I was on my way to my tap dancing class when my mother called …” Tap dancing? Who would have thought? It just goes to show how each of us is so much more than we appear to be. Like Terry.
Terry’s story:
“In school, I was quiet. I truly believed that if you did your work and obeyed the rules, you would do well. That was me. I loved science and math. I thought calculus was fun. I did well in school. Did I tell you that I loved math?”
She was quiet little Theresa Gooden, the girl who got 25 cents from her grandfather for picking potatoes and the girl who felt privileged to be able to candle, sort and package the eggs from the farm. The girl who loved math lived on her grandfather’ farm on South Street Road until she was 12 when they moved up to Seal Road and she met the boy next door who would become her husband.
“There was the in-between time…the time that I spent as a student at Cobleskill in the science laboratory program that led to a wonderful job in Rochester at Kodak,” she said. “I ran experiments in the newly-researched fields of blood lipids, cholesterol and triglycerides. I not only conducted the tests; I wrote the reports for the researchers. You know that kind of job where your colleagues value what you do? Well, this was one of those jobs.”
She and that boy next door, Mike, were married in St. Francis Xavier church in the village. She wore a simple wedding dress, one that she made, edged with tatted daisies. They moved first to Illinois and then to Tennessee where Mike had Prosthetist practices and taught at local universities, “but there was this not-so-subtle call from home, from family and Seal Road. We moved home and have lived in this house ever since.”
A house can tell tales, and Terry’s house, the one she shares with Mike, her spouse of 46 years, does just that. Inside, the open plan displays the varied interests and skillsets that Terry Hall has perfected.
There’s the new sewing machine, the piano, stacks of books and her beautiful photographs of the many places that she and Mike have visited. Scrapbooks, each a story in pictures, fill the bookcase … family history in digital form.
Along with the piano, Terry plays in the St. Francis Xavier Bell choir. She plays the heavy brass bells, the bass C, C sharp, D and D flat. Her music provides the infrastructure to the melody.
She’ll casually tell you that she built the entry staircase. You know, measuring and cutting lumber, using nails and screws, knowing what the rise and the run mean. Power tools. Nothing to it. Sure. She also repairs furnaces, or at least one particular furnace.
Outside, next to the handcrafted stairs, is the rose garden, teetering on the edge of magnificent bloom, where Terry decries the multiplied gladiolas that have filled in an area next to the driveway, where you will often see the RV that has taken them to Colorado and Alaska. Terry will not fly.
Her family is paramount.
“When the boys were young, I started a 4-H group. We taught everyone how to sew, how to make public presentations, tree identification and a little cooking.” Terry will tell you that among her many interests, cooking is not one of them.
“I went to work at Mike’s practice every day, but only after the three boys went to school and I came home in time to meet the bus. I tried to keep that up when they were in high school, but Mike didn’t fall for it.” She laughs. “I’ve worked with him for over 40 years and have been certified as the equivalent of a PA in a medical practice, an ABC Certified Fitter or Orthotics.”
“The adventure never ends,” she quips, as two years ago she was called on to expand her time and emotional management skills to an extraordinary degree, maintaining a bedside vigil for 25 days in the hospital and two weeks in a rehab facility as Mike recovered from bypass and mitral valve replacement surgery, while helping to care for her ailing father and keeping the couple’s professional business, Rehab Tech, going.
“I know what has to be done,” she said. “I set myself to do it and it gets done, maybe not perfectly, but done as well as I can”.
Remember my alluding to furnace repair? Well, during the time that Mike was home, but very ill, their Canadian pellet furnace, for which there are no known local repair personnel, stopped working. Who fixed it? Terry.
Her mother lives down the road and, after her Dad died last year, Terry, physically the closest of the nine siblings, makes sure that the COVID 19 restrictions are less restrictive for her Mom, trying to talk or visit her every day. “She keeps busy but it’s hard with the isolation.”
For her, family is strength. “We have a big family and wonderful friends. I even count myself as an adopted Ramsden,” she laughs. “There is always someone to ask for help, someone who can and will help. Of course,” she added. “you have to laugh.”
Her sons see her as someone always young, someone who takes on a job and finishes it, who attempts things both imagined and unimagined. Her energy and enthusiasm for life generate renewal, a way forward.
Terry is one of those extraordinary ordinary people, far more than what she appears, who love gardening, photography, volunteering at church, sewing, music, family, hard work, professional excellence carpentry, scrapbooking, sometimes plumbing and, yes, even tap dancing … the salt of the earth.
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
