Alice Butts’ memory reaches back to the 1920s, though sometimes she struggles to sort the events in between.

She loved milking the cows on her parents’ dairy farm in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, in the early morning before school, leaning her head against the cow’s side and squeezing out milk that tasted like grass and garlic. Cats would line up so she could squirt the milk into their open mouths.

Butts squeezed her fists together to show the milking motion.

She sat in a wheelchair in her shared Brookmont Healthcare and Rehab Center bedroom by the window, where her son-in-law had installed a bird feeder so she could watch the small birds jump up and peck from the newly filled receptacle.

Butts remembered how the other schoolchildren teased her because she smelled like cow. Her mother wouldn’t let her milk anymore.

“Why can boys smell and then girls daren’t?” Butts laughed. “That seems so unfair.”

They were poor on the farm, but Butts returned to happy memories of her childhood again and again.

“We could see the church from our porch,” Butts said. “I remember going to Sunday school and taking my shoes and socks off, and walking halfway in my bare feet, then stopping and putting my shoes and socks on. Then I wouldn’t have them all dirty.”

“I can still see that lane that we walked up,” she added.

Butts was the second of three. She and her older brother Robert turned their mother’s hair gray, Butts’ daughter Beverly Hofford joked.

They threw the eggs they were supposed to gather at each other, tried to shave each other’s chins (Butts still has the scar), drove the family car into a tree, and tried to smoke hay silk behind the corncrib. It didn’t work, Butts said.

The Great Depression didn’t really affect her.

“We didn’t understand what it meant, the Depression — we were too young,” Butts said. “We never had money anyway.”

The family still had their milk, eggs and meat slaughtered on the farm.

She earned her first paycheck working at an airplane factory in Philadelphia during World War II.

Butts gave it to her mother, who told her, “I don’t want your paycheck. That’s yours!” Butts remembered. She was so excited she threw the paycheck into the air.

She met her first husband, Roy Fehr, during these years. Dressed in his Army uniform, he accidentally stepped on her toe in the Quakertown train station, Hofford said. As she sat in the trolley car, the young soldier made his way through empty seats to sit beside her, Butts remembered.

They got married and settled in Monroe County, where they had two daughters, Beverly and Alice, and owned a bar in Snydersville.

Butts ran the bar during the day while her husband worked doing highway construction or other jobs.

Later, after her children had grown and she had divorced and remarried, Butts sewed blouses and button holes at Valerie Fashions in Wind Gap until her retirement.

Even after then, she kept busy. She drove American Cancer Society patients to and from their appointments, getting to know them personally and visiting them in her spare time.

She taught herself to crochet and said she gave the first blanket she made to her granddaughter because she couldn’t choose between her two daughters.

At her 100th birthday party held last week at Brookmont, she was surrounded by her two daughters, their children and grandchildren as well as Brookmont residents and staff and representatives from state Rep. Jack Rader and state Sen. Mario Scavello’s offices.

Now Butts can barely hear or see, and she can’t read the fiction she loves or do word puzzles anymore. But she is still quick to laugh.

Butts lives by the philosophy of, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” Hofford said.

It’s what helps her bear the spinal stenosis condition she has had since her 70s and the fall she took at her daughter’s house that brought her to Brookmont four years ago.

Her other philosophy is to treat people like you would want to be treated, her son-in-law Jim Hofford said.

“She’s always been that way,” Jim said. “She’d go the extra mile for people, like the cancer people she didn’t even know.”