- April 23, 2024
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The back porch of Nancy Allen’s Woodlands-area Palm Coast home is covered in bolts of cloth, spools of thread and the machines she uses to shape them into the quilts, blankets and children’s onesies and dresses that are laid in two-foot-deep stacks over a table.
A rescued miniature poodle sits in the 56-year-old woman’s lap as she works at the computer on the embroidery designs for her pieces, which take up most of her hours: about 16 a day.
But she once spent them in heartier activities: hunting bear and deer the rural New York towns where she grew up and raised a family before her move to Palm Coast.
Allen, with trim chin-length hair and a pair of black rimmed glasses, doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d hunt and eat a bear, or spend arduous hours turning maple sap into syrup or canning peaches or milking cows and making her own butter.
But she did it all.
BEAR MEAT AND VENISON
Allen grew up on a farm in Troupsburg, New York, without motorized transportation, then raised her own five daughters and two sons in the nearby town of Lindley.
“I really hunted, probably, from the time I was 9,” she said.
Once she turned 12, she could do it legally.
“Never shot a bear, but I went hunting when both my brothers have. We ate a lot of it, that’s for certain.” (The taste of bear meat, she says, “depends on how it’s cooked. …It’s a little more wild than deer, but very palatable.”)
But the days when venison was the family’s meat staple was a lifetime ago: Allen’s husband and her out-of-state siblings, who sometimes visit with ice chests full of fresh venison, marvel at the fact that Allen — an armed terror to the deer in her home state — now enjoys watching a family of deer that nibbles the grass in her suburban yard in the dawn hours. “You’re lucky you’re not in New York,” Allen’s husband, Dwight, likes to murmur to the hoofed intruders as he watches them contentedly chewing their cud.
Dwight Allen often does the shopping, but when she goes, Nancy Allen sometimes still marvels at all the things on the shelves that she for so many years made on her own.
Butter, of course — although she never liked the taste of the kind she made as a girl, because her grandmother never salted it — but also bread, canned fruits and maple syrup.
Allen and her siblings used to collect buckets of sloppy, sticky sap from hundreds of maple trees and haul it to the family’s sugar shanty, where it took about 62 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup.
‘WHAT WE HAD TO DO’
Allen didn’t put her own children through that particular torment, but they did learn how to blanch and can peaches, pick berries — and avoid the berry fields’ inevitable rattlesnakes — and make their own applesauce.
“We had a food mill that they knew how to crank,” Allen said. “All my kids are used to a lot of work,” as were their friends, who often came over and helped out.
“Whoever came to the house knew that they had to work. I had a garden, and they went to pick blueberries with us,” she said. “We rarely ever had less than 15 kids in our house. And what life that is, and what vitality! But I’d rather it happen there than have my kids out on the street.”
It was for her children that Allen really began sewing.
“If I didn’t know how to sew, my kids would’ve gone to school looking like ragamuffins,” she said. “I would go to the thrift store and get these adult dresses, and tear them apart and make them dresses.”
She made them ornate, and sometimes her daughters’ schoolmates asked where they came from. “And my kids were sworn to secrecy. I said ‘Don’t you ever tell them where you got that.’” Better that the other children thought the pretty dresses with the fancy lace and embroidery came from some Parisian boutique.
As her children got into high school, Allen said, “I think they were embarrassed because they didn’t have their Jordache jeans.” They got them when they were old enough to work and pay for them themselves.
“That’s just what we had to do,” Allen said.
A LITTLE TASTE OF HOME
As Allen’s children went to college — and all of them went — Allen herself returned to school, studying accounting and entering the corporate world, working in Jacksonville.
But she soon ended up sewing again.
Her manager’s wife, she said, rode show horses and wore ornate show jackets in competitions. “And he said, ‘She spends a fortune on these show shirts. She spends upwards of $2,000, $3,000 for them.’ And I said, ‘Well, I can make them.’”
So Allen did, and she “got into the business big.” “At one point I was making six show jackets a day,” she said.
Then people asked her to make chaps, so she made those, too, and a few asked for quilts, and she made those.
“And they would tell their friends and their friends’ friends,” Allen said.
Allen began making children’s clothes again, and quit the corporate world to spend time at home sewing, with Dwight — who digitizes her embroidery patterns for her — by her side.
Most of her work is donated. “For stuff that I give away, I probably send out 20 packages a week,” Allen said. “I’ve always had a big heart for people who didn’t have much, because of my past. … None of it’s a profitable venture; it just keeps me from getting lonely.”
She mentioned a recipient who was a single mom without much money to spend on fancy clothes. “Even single moms that don’t have very much like to have their babies in pretty clothes, and every being is important to me, especially the little beings,” Allen said.
But Allen might, yet, put down the sewing needle for a while and take up a rifle once more.
“This year I might go back up in order to buy an out-of-state license and go hunting with my sister and her husband, because I miss the togetherness of the family,” she said. “All my siblings hunt together up there, and it’s like a family reunion. It’s a good time.”
Allen prefers snow hunting, and doesn’t have a Florida hunting license, so the deer in Florida — including Allen’s backyard visitors — will remain safe from the family table. “I could never kill them; they’re my entertainment,” Allen said. “It’s that and my sewing. … It’s just like a little taste of home to me.”
