ENFIELD CENTER — Brenda Bailey Collins rarely chose to step in front of the camera. Instead, she lived behind it, watching and listening to the world around her.
“She was always paying attention to the little things,” said Jaunita Hoisington, Brenda’s youngest sister. “She was very thoughtful.”
Collins passed away on Oct. 28, 2021, after an 18-month battle with cancer.
She leaves behind a collection of photographs that highlight the beauty of the Upper Valley, though she was never professionally trained. The images are quiet; they capture the sunrise shining through pine trees, mist on a placid lake, a cluster of purple flowers in a grassy field. But some — such a shot of a turtle balanced precariously on a log — convey her sense of fun, according to her oldest sister Evelyn Bailey.
“She saw things — simple things, the beauty in the world that other people might not notice,” Evelyn said. “But when it was just the two of us, we would hack around like goofy little girls. She always had this sense of humor.”
Deborah Truman, Brenda’s cousin and lifelong best friend, said that as children, she and Brenda would go on hikes or bike rides and make up games and try to spy on each other. She also said that Brenda always loved photography, even when they were kids.
Evelyn first recognized Brenda’s talent when she was just 16, as Bailey was preparing to move away from home for the first time, Brenda took “really nice” photographs of her on a Brownie Hawkeye camera. As Brenda got older, Evelyn said, she upgraded her equipment and “her camera went with her everywhere,” especially when she spent time outdoors.
Evelyn said that Brenda’s love of nature would become evident on the long walks they took together, recalling one occasion when Brenda spent several minutes trying to identify the source of a sweet scent — wild hops — around a fallen tree in an abandoned apple orchard.
“There was nothing about nature that wasn’t interesting to her,” Evelyn said. “You and I would probably just keep right on hiking and think, ‘oh, that smelled nice’ and just keep going, but she would always stop to really appreciate whatever it was.”
Brenda spent as much time in nature as she could, kayaking on nearby ponds and tending a garden of indigenous plants traditionally grown and harvested by the Abenaki tribe that originally inhabited the Upper Valley area. Her younger sister, Janice Mattern, said that when Brenda was not at home, she was most comfortable in the woods.
Louisa Spencer, who with her husband, Stephen Wood , employed Collins at Poverty Lane Orchard for nearly 40 years, recalled a business trip she and Brenda took to New York when Brenda said she felt “lost” in the city.
“She said, ‘I am lost everywhere in this town. I don’t know which way to turn anywhere … I would never get lost in the woods, but I am permanently lost here,’ ” Spencer said. “But she never let on, she never showed any nerves. She just nailed it.”
Brenda was originally hired at the orchard as an apple packer, recommended by her then-boyfriend Delbert Collins. (Delbert requested not to be interviewed for this article.) Brenda and Delbert had been together since they were teenagers, and got married when their son, Brian, was 10 years old.
Wood said that he and the other orchard employees did not even know that Brenda was pregnant until she requested the afternoon off one day, saying, “I have to have a baby.”
“It was the cold time of the year, and she had these great big coats on just like the rest of us,” he recalled. “So, we didn’t know she was pregnant, she didn’t tell us until she was just, in a matter-of-fact way, going off to have her baby, which was one of the great delights of her life. She just had a beautiful, matter-of-fact way about her.”
Spencer and Wood both said that in addition to being an excellent and capable employee, Brenda was a friend to everyone in the Poverty Lane family, from high schoolers working their first jobs to seasonal workers who traveled from Jamaica each year to pick apples.
“She just held our whole little crazy outfit together in a way I don’t think anyone else could have done,” Spencer said. “She just approached people directly, without any preconceptions, and it worked every time.”
Spencer said that Brenda was in charge of training new summer employees, many of whom were teenagers, on how to run the orchard’s pick-your-own raspberry field. Over the decades, many of those workers have since told Spencer that “that job and that contact with Brenda helped them in every job they, they had thereafter.”
“She helped a lot of people take their first big strides in life,” Spencer said.
Wood said that over Brenda’s 40-year tenure at the orchard, she never betrayed the confidence of an orchard employee to him or to Spencer.
“She was about the most loyal, silent friend you could possibly have,” he said. “She was the glue that held this whole place together.”
According to her sisters, Brenda was also the glue of the Bailey family. When their parents divorced, Evelyn said, Brenda remained the “anchor” for the family because she continued to live in their childhood home.
“Family gatherings continued to be (at the family home) uninterruptedly, just as they had been when we were growing up,” Evelyn said. “It’s a huge loss for us in so many ways, not just her not being with us anymore, but that fact that she was the central focal point of her family.”
Holidays and family were synonymous for Brenda, Evelyn said, and she always hosted holiday and birthday celebrations at the house. Janice said that the four sisters — three of whom once became pregnant within five months of each other — would often host their children’s birthday parties there so that the cousins could grow up together.
“She was like the rock, and in a way that gave me and my other two sisters comfort, knowing that she was still there,” Janice said. “We are all heartbroken that that is not the case anymore.”
Brenda’s love of holidays was also manifest in her love for giving thoughtful gifts. For Evelyn’s 50th birthday, Brenda gave her a parchment scroll with a list written calligraphy of childhood memories the two of them experienced together. One Christmas, she wrote her mother a poem about a memory of walking home through the snow as a child to the warmth of the family Christmas tree. Another year, she gifted Juanita a framed print of her favorite photograph — a shot of a flowering tree in the yard of their childhood home. Brenda even gave Truman the dress in which she got married.
“She was a generous soul,” Evelyn said. “The gifts that she would give were simple, but she had a way of making the simplest things so, so special.”
Brenda’s close ties to her family came from her deep roots in the Upper Valley, which also made her a fixture in her community. Though she was adventurous and loved learning about other cultures — Evelyn said she would regularly cook herself Jamaican curries — for Brenda, there was no place like home.
“She was like Dorothy,” Janice joked.
“When all the rest of the young people were really mobile and moving away from home and traveling in the late ‘60s or through the mid-1970s, she stayed, and is one of the few who made that choice,” Evelyn said. “I think for her, her ability to really fulfill the scope of her being was here.”
In addition to her photographs, Brenda leaves behind a legacy of quiet kindness that touched the lives of everyone she spoke with.
“She was a very generous minded, honest, loyal pal to all manner of people,” Wood said. “Her main concentration was really about just being a good human.”
“She was always kind,” Truman added. “She was just a nice person.”
Lauren Adler can be reached at ladler19@gmail.com.