~ Risk N' Hope ~

Perhaps people are like salmon. Perhaps the area in which we are born marks us as indelibly as a badly healed childhood wound. Perhaps moving away from our beginnings becomes our badly healed childhood wound. Perhaps, like salmon, we spend the rest of our lives trying to return to what we first knew, trying to recreate the atmosphere, trying to ‘go home’.

I was born to farm people. I was the fourth generation of my family to live in the two-storey, Dutch-gabled, white and green farmhouse on the south half of 7-13-22, near a tiny village in Manitoba. My first memories are of that house and of events transpiring within it. The smell of lilacs will still send me reeling through time to land on the front lawn in the heavy-scented shade of a lilac hedge planted on the east side of the house, now nearly seventy years ago. Last time I checked, the hedge was still there.

Some people paint flowers or wildlife or the sea. Some people paint mountains or hearth scenes or fantasy worlds. Fields and farm buildings form the subjects of most of my paintings and drawings. Like salmon, I have spent most of my life feeling the murmured lure of ‘home’.

A movie I am very fond of tells of an aged woman, living with her son and daughter-in-law who do not, cannot understand. Our grandmotherly woman runs away from home and makes a long journey by bus to ease her longing to return to the place of her childhood. It is—and is not—everything she expected. That is as it should be.

Somehow, I have become the repository of family memorabilia. Somehow, I have become the dumping ground for all those things found in chests and drawers and boxes by my aunts and uncles, things which would be of absolutely no worth to anyone who did not have the happy accident of being born into our family. I have received photographs, brittle and yellowed newspaper clippings, school reports, scribblers filled with the daily musings of my grandmother, bundles of greeting cards given and received five decades ago, envelopes full of postcards picked up during road trips through the northern states, decorative plates commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of this church or the seventy-fifth anniversary of that settlement, a number of community history books and even a portion (just a portion, mind you) of a watch which once belonged to my great-grandmother. Amassed, these items would be of laughable value to anyone who did not know the land and people whose artefacts these are. My children, a generation removed, have been to the farm, have seen the house, have wandered through it, but it was unlived-in and contained, to their eyes, nothing more than a few dishevelled remains, the detritus of a family long moved on. A generation removed, my children never knew most of the people whose well-loved images appear in the photographs on my piano. A generation removed, my children have lives shaped by different forces, different faces, different places. This farm in south-western Manitoba with the two-storey, Dutch-gabled, white and green house, is, to them, nothing more than the stuff of legend, for truly, that is what a family history becomes.

Treasured among the goodies passed to me for safekeeping is a cash book for the farm, kept the year I was born. Written across twelve pages in this blue-covered, coil-bound volume, I see evidence of the successes, the disappointments and the struggle which characterised farm life in that day. Then, as now. I see that the hired man’s name was Mervin and that he was paid wages of two dollars; I see that a trip to the city meant paying for a meal (forty cents) and parking meter (one cent); I see that a hair cut set you back a dollar and each visit from the vet (twice in one week during June) was a six dollar touch. The ledger records that a tractor could be obtained (from Ed Hare) for $25, and a truck could be bought for $35. A sow sold netted $47.65 while a sow bought cost $65. Cigarettes cost fifty cents and bars were a nickel. The cost of a dance plus lunch was $2.55 while the same evening out including a sitter for me, was $5.50. After totalling the receipts from hog cheques, premiums, cattle cheques, baby bonus, et cetera and deducting the costs of feed, seed, gas, veterinarian, barn spray, insurances and machine parts, et cetera—oh, wait...deduct the payments made to my grandfather, with whom the farm was operated in partnership (though my grandfather lived in town) - and the year’s profit breaks down into a monthly income of approximately $55, from which must be deducted groceries ($8-$12 every two weeks), hydro ($6.05 per month), telephone ($6 per month), fridge payment ($13 per month), prescriptions and clothing/shoes/diapers for two adults and a baby. Is it any wonder the words my father penned on the front cover of the ledger are “RISK N’ HOPE”?

Someone tucked a store receipt inside the front cover of the “Risk N’ Hope” cash book. It is a receipt for coffee, sugar and milk from Glinz’s Solo Store, total cost: ninety-three cents. For the record, Glinz’s Solo Store features “nationally advertised merchandise: groceries, dry goods, fruit & vegetables”. If you found the need to contact Glinz’s Solo Store by telephone, you would, as directed by the notice at the top of the receipt, “Phone 9”.

I received a call the other day. Someone found some old photographs they had forgotten about and they are forwarding them to me to do whatever it is I do with them. The current owner of the vacated, family-less farmhouse has offered me the great gift of both coloured glass windows from the front room. Curiously, it seems that ‘home’ is slowly making its way to me.

I have placed the three-column cash book on my bookshelf between “75th Anniversary History of Blanshard Municipality, 1884-1959” and “History of Blanshard Municipality, Volume II, 1884-1970”, produced for Manitoba’s centennial celebrations. I know that whatever spiritual connection remains between me and my Manitoba farm, I am beyond fortunate to live, as I do, on a corner lot in an Alberta town. My house is white and green, but it is only one storey and there are no Dutch gables.

I have, however, planted lilacs on the east side of the house. Perhaps in seventy years, someone—a grand child or great-grandchild, perhaps—will come reeling through time to land on the front lawn in the heavy-scented shade of my lilac hedge.