Labor Day Memories
From my Morning Pages journal, September 8, 2025
43 years ago today, I was in Leonard Morse hospital in labor. My youngest son, Owen, was making his way into the world. He’s turned out pretty good :)1
This past week has been a constant flood of memories. Last Monday, I was thinking of Labor Days gone by—how my whole family, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, in-laws and family friends, gathered together at my grandmother’s house on Grant Street to watch the annual Labor Day Parade. Grant Street, located in the middle of the French Canadian enclave of Marlborough, Massachusetts, debouched onto Main Street and, because the marching bands and the floats—many staged and decorated on flat trailers from my grandfather’s transportation company—started out one block away on Broad Street, we had front row seats and got to see all the participants at their freshest and most energetic.
A few hours later, when the last float, band and politician were waving and passing the crowd all around us, the menfolk, responsible for getting the grills fired up, melted away from the crowd still in lawn chairs at the top of the street to prepare the Cookout that was yet to come. The aunts set up the serving tables of potato, macaroni and three bean salads, baked beans, and condiments. We were a huge crowd.
My father was the eldest of six, each with their own growing families (32 grandchildren in total.) As the traffic was blocked off at both ends of the street for the duration of the parade, we had the length of it to play tag, skip rope, ride scooters or explore the big barn-like garage my great-grandfather had built for his transportation business. In a dusty corner resided the old upright piano whose keys nearly all worked, although not necessarily in tune. Three of us could play “Chopsticks” together on it easily.
Our town’s Labor Day Parade was the biggest and most elaborate of its holiday parades. Even the 4th of July’s wasn’t as big, although that always ended in fireworks at Ward Park. I think Labor Day was a bigger deal because Marlborough had been a thriving factory town as early as 1836, with a significant focus in shoes and boots. Boots for Union soldiers were made there during the Civil War and John Brown’s Bell from Harpers Ferry still hangs from a tower in the small park near the old Firehouse. It was the home of the famous Frye Boot Company, founded in 1863.
The Labor Day cookout would be the last of the summer. The following Wednesday would be Back to School day. Even now, this time of year makes me feel like I should have books under my arm and new pristine notebooks and sharpened pencils in my bag.
I wrote much of this a week ago as my mind—and heart—flooded with all the images conjured by the memory of those events in the town where I grew up. While the seeds of this post were sown on September 1st, they were set aside as I got involved in another project. Do we ever have just one project going at a time? I think not. During the intervening days between Labor Day and Owen’s birthday I began working on another video for the Robbie O’Connell Songbook, “Farewell Until Tomorrow” (scheduled to be published on September 21).
As is often the case, the mood of memory and recollection paved the way for a different approach: not just one or two images for the video but a crowd of photos— friends and family both all around us and those no longer among us. It took days and days to collect the photos and curate the ones that would work best for the song. We had more than 150 for the first pass, far too many for a recording only 3.6 minutes long. I decided to approach it like a photo album and collated a series of collages, some of a single person, others mixed and most with Robbie in the frame somewhere. It was a task both absorbing and full of emotion. The tricky part—one that is rarely involved in a paper photo album—was matching the images to the words of the songs and having the transitions happen at the right points in the music. I think I spent more time on this one video than all the rest of the twelve songs we’ve set up so far for the songbook. A labor of love, if you will.
Embrace the day.
This post was compiled from several journal pages and then written while I was in hospital (again) for some surgery. I only had my iPad and that didn’t let me do the fancy things like footnotes and galleries so actually posting this had to wait until I got home to my computer. (The surgery went fine and I'm feeling pretty good. No driving, bending, lifting or housework for 6 weeks though—so I might be doing more SubStacking… when I’m not knitting or quilting.)