I grew up within earshot of history – my family has always been riddled with storytellers. This is not to say the stories these tellers told were always factual nor were their accounts of history always accurate but they were certainly entertaining. A story when told is always evolving – it doesn’t have a choice, it has a new vantage with every new teller, an added personal touch, an individual flare. A story told borders on fiction – facts fall by the way in search of reaction. No one tells a story if not for entertainment’s sake. A story told should not be confused with the truth.
My mother was an excellent storyteller.
There was not much cooking in Calgary in the 1950s – especially for a woman plunked on the edge of town with three little kids and nowhere to go – no car, no money, no friends (yet). Mom’s life must have been hellish lonely and that first winter long.
In retrospect that long winter was a blessing for us kids, we had Mom all to ourselves – I’m not sure she felt equally blessed. Perhaps in an effort to keep us entertained, or maybe to keep herself from going insane, she told us stories to pass the time. Mom reminisced about olden days and kept her underaged audience mesmerized. She began to paint her memory into my imagination.
As a little girl sometimes it was hard to determine whose memory I was actually remembering. Had I ever been to Uncle Roy’s farm or was he a character in one of my mother’s vivid stories? Was it me who patted that spoilt horse named Dolly who poked her head in the kitchen window to watch Aunt Edna shell peas for supper? Had I watched giant clouds of dust blacken the sky as the parched earth of the prairie blew across the plains and made the thirties dirty?
In the summers of her olden days Mom and a sister or two used to take the train from Winnipeg to Carberry to spend time at the old family homestead. She said she was sent to help Uncle Roy with his chores, my guess is she was sent to give my Gramma a break for a week or two. Uncle Roy was my grandmother’s youngest brother, he and Aunt Edna lived in the red brick farmhouse in which Gramma was born in 1898.
I would get to visit that farm a time or two on our yearly trek ‘home’ to Winnipeg from Calgary back in my own olden days. It was always a grand adventure. Uncle Roy was an old man by then but the red brick farmhouse still stood and still lacked indoor plumbing. I’ve never been keen on outhouses.
I think Mom must have been Uncle Roy’s favorite niece, she was (as I’ve mentioned) easy to love. We were always welcomed with heartfelt hugs and giant smiles.
We were a traveling circus back in the day, my brother and sisters and I, and would have been crammed in the car for hours while Dad made short work of the Trans-Canada between provinces – we’d tumble out of the car to be greeted by startled chickens and barking dogs.
We didn’t stop at the farm every year – sometimes Dad was hell bent for Winnipeg and drove straight through, stopping only for emergency bathroom breaks. He built a wooden bench one year that fit over the hump on the floor in the backseat of the Buick, he measured it perfectly to line up with the seat and padded it with an old quilt. The backseat and the bench created enough space for two kids to sleep comfortably, the third kid got to lay across the ledge by the back window and the baby rode in the front on Mom’s lap. We were a speeding accident waiting to happen – thankfully the accident never happened.
Anyways – back to the farm.
We’d been primed on the drive to be on our best behavior and not to stare. Uncle Roy had had an operation that left him with only one eye and a terribly disfigured face. We were to be quiet and polite. To our surprise Uncle Roy met us on the porch of the farmhouse – his hat pulled a little low shading his patched eye – he gave us the half a smile the doctors had left him with and hugged us as fiercely as ever.
The chickens scattered as soon as our boots hit the ground. Uncle Roy told my brother if he could catch a hen he could keep it. Cancer had claimed his gentle good looks but not his devilish sense of humor. He left it to Mom to tell my brother he couldn’t keep the exhausted bird tucked under his arm, that it would have to stay at the farm with its friends where hopefully it would resume laying eggs for Aunt Edna.
Our goodbye that year felt different – I couldn’t have known at the time that it would be our last pit stop at the farm. That was probably the day Uncle Roy became a story.
