Memories part one

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

Saskatchewan meant early mornings, windy days, pulling weeds until our hands were green, four enormous meals a day, riding the tractor or the grain-hauling trucks (but never the combine, that was too dangerous), driving 25 miles to the nearest town for coffee and gossip at the Co-op (in later years, driving the same 25 miles to town for a beer), or a hundred miles north to "the lake" to swim for a day. After the harvest, both families would often drive together to Alberta to stay at Banff or Jasper and walk on the glaciers, or possibly even as far as Vancouver.

Saskatchewan meant being driven mad by mosquitos, being scared by the noises of unseen animals in the Bush (rabies!), being chased by chickens and geese if you went near them at their usual feeding time, chasing the calves out of the grain or the vegetable garden or the flower beds; the smell of motor oil and rubber and the rustle of mice in the cool, echoing Quonset-hut equipment sheds; separating compostable garbage from the rest, and burning the latter in a steel pail; not flushing the toilet if you'd only peed; being in a house without books - unthinkable! - then noticing that the whole community was essentially without books; the smell of the pulp mill which carried fifteen miles downwind; weddings, so many weddings, every year it seems now, with dances and self-catered receptions for up to three hundred close friends and family, when the Mounties would leave town and go sit out by the highway to avoid having to arrest every single citizen for DWI. (There was in fact very little drunkenness, Lutherans are big on self-control.)

Saskatchewan meant realizing one day that the meat we were eating had answered to its name until quite recently; walking out behind the farmhouse and hearing absolutely no man-made sounds at all, not even aircraft; waving and nodding at oncoming cars on the road (typically not more than three during the ride to the Co-op) because we knew them all; a tiny one-room airport, where you walked through a screen door just like the one at home to get to the staircase-on-wheels up to the airplane; houses with two kinds of cold running water: drinking water from the well and "cistern water" that could be cooked with after boiling, or showered under (but don't get it in your eyes or mouth).

Saskatchewan meant being surrounded by animals, wild and domesticated and halfway between like the cat that simply arrived one Spring day and settled into the old garage, tacitly bartering rodent-control skills for a warm and dry place to stay; my uncle's enormous strong hands, his fingers each as thick as my young wrist; the smell of the Bush, an unmistakeable, inimitable compound of poplar, wolfwillow, aspen, pine, drying dust and various grasses going to seed.

Saskatchewan meant a hierarchy of roads, from two-lane paved to single-lane paved to pressed-and-oiled to gravelled to graded-earth to muddy tracks, and how you drove on each. A skilled driver could maintain a thirty-mile-per-hour four-wheel drift, proceeding steadily northwards although the car's nose pointed alternately east and west. Being in cars at all was something specific to the summer holidays, my parents didn't own a car until after we kids had left home.

Saskatchewan meant berries, so many berries of so many kinds, blueberries blackberries gooseberries cranberries strawberries raspberries and best of all the bittersweet bluered (not purple) saskatoons; driving out in the morning to pick saskatoons which we ate in a pie that evening with whipped cream from my aunt's own cows.

Saskatchewan meant our cousins, being constantly surrounded by masses of other children, and the dilemma of loving their company but wanting desperately some time alone by myself.

Saskatchewan still means most of those things to me.

This was my blog's second birthday, but I was too caught up in this Memories series to notice.