Debbie Howland’s sister-in-law, Debra Goodwin, bought roses for her funeral. Three weeks later, two flowers still bloomed ruby-red in a Mason jar at Debbie’s brother’s house in Lebanon.
She sent a photograph of the roses to her nieces, Katie Podolsky, 46, and Christina Howland, 51. They responded with awe: Without realizing it, Debra had texted the photo on the day of their parents’ 56th wedding anniversary.
Deborah “Debbie” Howland died from complications from her cancer treatment on Aug. 21 in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she had lived full-time since 2006, moving from her native New Hampshire to be close to her daughters and grandchildren, who live in Tampa. Debbie was buried in Lebanon with her yellow Labrador, Gus. She and her husband, Doug Howland, made their mark on the Upper Valley with their businesses, Howland Upholstery and Howl’n Good Kettle Corn, the latter still open today and run by Lebanon local Rick Desharnais.
One day, when Doug was a student at Lebanon High School, he walked up to Debbie and a group of her friends playing with a Ouija board. Seeing him approach, the girls asked the board who Doug was going to marry. The spirit spelled out “Debbie Goodwin.”
“I’d never marry her!” Doug remembered saying.
“Don’t worry, Howland,” Debbie told him. “I wouldn’t marry you.”
Less than two months later, Doug walked into the high school building after school hours to see what was going on at a yearbook work party. He and Debbie spent the evening working on pages together; after all, they had been friends since the fifth grade. When they were done, he asked her for a ride home.
Debbie pulled the car over on the way to Doug’s house so they could keep talking. He asked her to an upcoming school dance.
When it was time to go, Doug asked Debbie, “Can you take me back to the high school? My car’s up there.”
The Ouija was right. A year out of high school, Debbie Goodwin married Doug Howland at the Lebanon Elks Lodge. Thanks to the mounted elk heads on the walls, she looks like she has antlers sprouting out of her head in all their wedding photos. At her brother Donnie Goodwin’s wedding to Debra, Debbie (who also planned the bridal shower) made sure the photographer did a better job photographing her sister-in-law.
After her brother married a woman with the same name, Debbie called herself “the OG Debbie Goodwin.”
The other Debra Goodwin met Debbie a week into dating Donnie. At first, Debbie was skeptical of her little brother’s new girlfriend: She had high standards for those allowed to date the people she loved most. But Debra passed all the tests, and Debbie welcomed her into their family. When Debra had her first child, Debbie walked her through the process of breastfeeding. Later, when Debra had to have shoulder surgery, Debbie took care of her at the Howlands’ home.
Debbie was the boss of their household and the brains behind every operation she and Doug worked on together, her husband said. He was the ideas guy; she executed. Their successful furniture upholstery business operated out of their basement for years, just the two of them. Their work is still visible throughout the Upper Valley: They upholstered many of the chairs at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and local restaurants.
Howl’n Good Kettle Corn was another of Doug’s ideas brought to life by his detail-oriented wife. He did the cooking, and Debbie handled customers at the Lebanon Farmers Market at Colburn Park. Her characteristic charm — and the not-too-sweet kettle corn — kept people coming back. When returning customers approached Debbie at the booth, she remembered everything they had told her about themselves and asked how things were going, according to Debra Goodwin.
Debbie could talk to anyone. In the summers, she and Doug lived in an RV and managed the campground at Loon Lake that her brother and sister-in-law owned. She’d meet a camper and learn all about their life, then come back to her family and fill them in.
“She was curious about people,” Debra said.
She loved beautiful things; Debra called her home in Lebanon “a little fantasy world.” Debbie had a trained eye for a thrift-store deal and crafty hands that could turn somebody else’s trash into a treasure. She painted and took classes to learn how to make stained glass, filling her home, and those of her children, with color.
A mother, a best friend
Christina is nearly five years older than Katie, and they’re different people, but all three Howland girls were best friends.
“She was always my best friend, from when I was little to now that I’m big,” Katie said.
The sisters always confided in their mother; so did their friends, and so did their children, when they came on the scene. When Christina’s son Max was a toddler, he used to stare at the photograph of his grandparents on the fridge in Christina’s house in Florida and say, “I miss Papa!” Christina thought it was funny how much he seemed to miss his grandfather Doug.
Then Debbie and Doug came to visit, and Max ran past his grandfather and straight into Debbie’s arms. From then on, all of the Howlands’ grandchildren called their grandmother “Lil’ Papa.”
“Papa was just the most positive person I’ve ever met,” Ava McKay, Christina’s 17-year-old daughter, told her mother recently.
A woman of strength
Debbie adored the roles she fulfilled — as a wife, mother and grandmother — but she also believed staunchly in a woman’s ability to do anything a man could do, and probably better. Growing up, she watched her father take her younger brother, Donnie, into the woods to help with his logging job. Though Christina said Debbie would have been strong enough to help, too, she wasn’t invited because she was a girl in the 1960s.
When it was Debbie’s turn to raise children, she taught her daughters they could be whatever they wanted. When Christina was little, her mother bought her a T-shirt with airbrushed letters spelling out, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
She had little patience for anyone who crossed her family or said something chauvinistic. When Debbie and Doug owned their upholstery business, customers would call asking for the owner, and Debbie would answer, “You’re speaking to her.” Sometimes, they would say, “Well, I think the owner is Doug Howland. Can I talk to him?” That was not a wise thing to say to Debbie.
“She would light them up,” Christina said.
Debbie’s strength extended to her physical frame, though she was not a large woman. Christina called her mother the physically strongest woman she had ever met. She could carry furniture with ease, and she always beat her daughters in their after-dinner wrestling matches.
“It was really weird, but it was funny because she would obviously completely dominate,” Christina said.
Her deftness tackling her daughters came in handy later on. When Christina had her first child, Max, she was in labor for five days, and the doctors kept sending her home. Her mother came to stay with her at her house in Tampa, Florida. On the fourth night Christina was in labor, she went into the hospital; her doctors gave her some sleeping pills, and she went back home. In the middle of the night, she got out of bed and wandered around her house, she said, in a sort of trance. She almost fell down the stairs.
Debbie ran out of her room and “body-slammed” her daughter to the floor. She led her through breathing exercises and yelled at Christina’s husband to get the car. If something needed to get done, Debbie was the woman to do it.
Debbie’s last girls’ night
In New Hampshire, Debbie focused on her family, Sacred Heart Church in Lebanon and the businesses she ran with her husband. When she and Doug partially retired and moved to Florida, her social life flourished. She dragged new friends out to dances and went to $5 burger nights. When they moved to the retirement community Americana Cove in St. Petersburg, she became head of the gardening committee and spent hours in the Florida sun, honing her vast knowledge of plants.
“Any [gardening] contractor that came in here had to pass Debbie first,” Doug said.
Her home often swelled with music. Debbie loved to dance, and would do so on Saturday mornings with Katie and Christina, listening to the “Grease” soundtrack and cleaning their house. They went to P!nk concerts together and sang along with Dolly Parton — who died just four days after Debbie. Katie and Christina said they’re sure their mother has since met their beloved country icon.
The night before Debbie died, Katie called her sister to tell her their mother was in an ambulance, and Christina flew down from her vacation home in Massachusetts. The girls stayed in the hospital room with their mother all night, listening to P!nk, Parton and “Grease.” Katie and Christina sang and gossiped to their mom while she slept.
“We had a full-on girls’ night,” Christina said.
The nurse there with the Howland girls that night told Christina and Katie to tell their mother all their secrets before she died. They had none.
