FAIRFIELD – Eileen Gould, 100, recalls life 92 years ago when she was growing up on Prospect Street in Waterville.

She had three sisters and two brothers; the family had a Shetland pony they hooked up to a two-wheel cart with seats arranged in a semicircle around the back.

Additional Photos

Centenarian Eileen Gould and her adopted granddaughter, Vita Gould, chat outside on a porch at Gould’s home in Fairfield. Vita spends time both in Fairfield and St. Albans with her legal guardians and for many years was raised by her grandmother. “She’s very huggy, she’s very welcoming,” Vita says. “If I bring my friends over, she’s like, ‘Hi, hi!’ “ David Leaming/Morning Sentinel

“My sister drove the pony,” Gould said. “She was very capable and we used to ride around Waterville in the pony cart and a sleigh in the winter. The roads were all dirt then.”

Gould’s mother was a homemaker; her father owned a heating and plumbing business.

“He was in charge of plumbing and heating at Colby College, which at that time was on College Avenue,” she said.

Gould remembers those days with fondness, but she is very much in the present.

She lives in her own home with her cat, Oreo, attends church, takes aerobics classes twice a week at the Muskie Center in Waterville and is a member of a group for people with low vision that meets monthly at the Lobster Trap in Winslow.

“I have no complaints,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table in her tidy Center Road farmhouse. “My eyesight is bad, but I’m very blessed. I like to be on the go. I don’t like sitting around and I never have. I’ve always liked to go and see things and be where the crowd is.”

The blue-eyed, blond-haired Gould has a lot to live for, particularly her 16-year-old granddaughter, Vita, whom she raised after Vita’s mother, Tracey Gould, a nurse, died of ovarian cancer 10 years ago. Vita, who was adopted, was in first grade at the time.

Vita, who will be a senior in the fall at Temple Academy in Waterville, now divides her time between her grandmother’s house and the home of Bonnie and Larry Post of St. Albans, who about four years ago became Vita’s legal guardians. Bonnie Post teaches at Temple Academy and Larry Post is town manager of Hartland.

Vita, who hopes to go to college next year, describes her grandmother as fun to be around and always happy to have Vita’s friends visit.

“She’s very huggy, she’s very welcoming,” Vita said. “If I bring my friends over, she’s like, ‘Hi, hi!’“

Vita did the decorating for her grandmother’s 100th birthday party hosted last month by the Victor Grange, where Gould is a member.

Born in Oakland on May 28, 1910, Eileen Short graduated from Coburn Classical Institute in Waterville in 1928. She married Lloyd Gould in 1936 and they had their daughter, Tracey, and moved to Florida, where they owned and operated a company that manufactured gaskets for airline equipment, she said.

He died of Parkinson’s disease in 1970 and she moved back to Maine.

Gould also was a Montessori schoolteacher. She has a ham radio license and for years enjoyed the hobby.

Her secret to longevity?

“I don’t know,” she says. “My mother lived to be 100 and she always said, ‘Don’t think about your age. Forget your age and be yourself.’ I don’t feel any differently than I ever did. You’re going to still be you, no matter what your age is.”

She advises people to try to be kind to one another.

“You never know what anybody else’s life has been like. You don’t know where the children have been — maybe they’ve been abused or haven’t had any breakfast.

“It pays to be kind to everybody. You learn that sometimes people’s lives surprise you. You might think one thing and be completely off-target.”

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