FORT KENT – Rhea Cote Robbins of Brewer has spent years tracing her French origins and several recent years writing down French and English proverbs she remembers hearing from her mother as she was growing up in Waterville.

An author, teacher and mother herself now, Robbins has developed 39 colorful poster-size wall hangings of her mother’s sayings, preserving them to give herself a sense of personal ownership of her heritage and lineage.

The first public showing of her work, “Maman Disait” (translated as “Mama Said”), will be at the University of Maine at Fort Kent’s Acadian Archives this weekend. The public opening of the three-month show will be at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 3.

“It’s a traditional interpretation, but also very family specific,” Robbins said Saturday. “This is a first for me, and it’s important for me to have it up north where my knowledge comes from.

“I have a foot in northern Maine, although I don’t know much about northern Maine,” she said. “It’s an effort for me to connect with my mother.”

Robbins’ mother, Rita St. Germaine, was born in 1919 in Wallagrass and raised in the village just south of Fort Kent. After attending Madawaska Training School, a forerunner of UMFK, and working in Allagash lumber camps for two years, St. Germaine left Aroostook County at the age of 17 and never returned.

St. Germaine married Raymond Cote in 1940 and raised her family of four children in Waterville.

Robbins graduated from the University of Maine at Presque Isle in 1982, the year her mother died. Robbins went on to earn a master’s degree in art in 1997 from the University of Maine in Orono, where her studies were funded in part by a federal grant awarded in recognition of the Franco-American population in Maine.

Since then, Robbins has written books and poetry peppered with French phrases commonly used in northern Maine. She has worked as an editor of Le Forum, an international bilingual journal published by the Franco-American Center at the University of Maine, and has published “Wednesday’s Child” and a sequel, “Down The Plains.” Her poetry has appeared in UMFK’s River Review.

Robbins teaches literary courses at UMaine in Franco-American women’s experiences, general literature and creative nonfiction writing.

Among “les proverbes” Robbins remembers fondly is one her mother used to say when she was driving behind a particularly slow motorist: “J’avais le temps de passer trois fois (I would have time to pass him three times).”

“She would just say them,” Robbins said. “I had no problem understanding French, but I needed for her to explain these ‘proverbes’ and where they came from.”

Her mother’s little nuggets came out in both English and French, Robbins said. “It’s wisdom, and it was just there, thrown out in conversation,” she said.

Some of the French sayings did not readily translate or make much sense in English. Robbins remembers being brought up with these sayings at a time when teachers and nuns frowned on her using French in school and told Robbins that her French was a “bad French, not real words.”

Robbins now wants to share part of her mother’s heritage and her way of looking at the world.

Each of the 39 individual sayings is featured in its own collage with colorful artwork and photos to illustrate it. Robbins said that she wanted to make sayings visible, something that could be looked at hanging on a wall.

She stresses that her mother was not a unique person – just the opposite – with many Franco-Americans likely using the same or similar phrases back then.

“Those who see it [the collages] will experience things which Maman disait a moi toutes les journees [things Mama said to me every day],” Robbins said. “This is not simply an exercise in nostalgia, but how I choose to reclaim for myself the proverbs and to give meaning to them as I see them, part of the everyday magic of life.”

“Maman Disait” will be on exhibit at UMFK’s Acadian Archives through February. The exhibit is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday each week or by appointment.