She Stood Her Ground

Marie has told me countless stories over the last almost eleven years. Some have lessons for us to learn and some are humorless and some are fun. She does not complain about her hardships for the most part. She just states the facts that this did indeed happen.
She and her husband lived in a cold water flat four stories up. If you have read the previous posts, this particular apartment cost five dollars a month.
Their first child, Marie, was very tiny. She had been in an incubator for sever weeks. That incubator had to be borrowed from a Jewish hospital because the hospital where Little Marie was born did not have one.
Marie, being a normal mother was very protective of her new baby. Marie told me that the landlord was a "slumlord." He insisted on his rent and would not do any updating. She told me that she had been commissioned to bake a special cake for five dollars. That equaled a whole month's rent. She baked the cake in the evening and was going to frost it in the morning.  The next morning when she went into the kitchen the cake was black with ants.
Those of you that know Marie personally know that the ants were the last straw. It was not only the lost five dollars she was very upset about, but she found ants in her baby's crib.
She found the landlord and explained to him in no uncertain terms that he would exterminate the building or she would tell the Housing Authorities about the way he took care of his tenants and his building. He was unhappy but had exterminators come to the building. That was worse than the ants in some respect. Her family could not tolerate the spray they used, so they had to go to her parents for awhile until "the dust settled" so to speak.
When she got home the ants were dead, but she decided that she was going to wallpaper the walls and have a fresh start. It seems that there were fifteen layers of wallpaper; behind each layer of paper were dead bugs.
She went to the basement and there were bags and bags of trash that had been left to rot and accumulate.
There is a lot of the story missing, but I wanted to tell you about some of the things that she had tolerated and worked through to get to 102 years of age.