It was a last minute trip home, but one I think I needed. Living away from family can be difficult at times, you miss those people greatly and don't seem to talk to them enough when you're away. My family, I guess, fairly close, just over four hours away, but with life happening around you it can be difficult to get there or for them to come for a visit.
My parents were off on a vacation, but my sister was home and I was able to visit with an aunt and uncle as well as a couple cousins and their families. I ended up getting home with a little bit of time before we all went out for supper with my granny.
She turned 90-years-old in March, though she laughed and said she was 49 and holding when we brought it up. Someone laughed exclaiming most people hold at 29, but granny just said she couldn't get away with that anymore.
Recently I've been stopping by the Newhope Lodge in Stoughton and have been putting together stories of people's pasts for the paper. So, as I sat across the table from granny and she told me a few of her stories, I wondered why I hadn't recorded them before to keep my own family history alive, after all the woman is 90!
The next morning I grabbed coffee for us both and headed over to get the scoop. I found myself listening to both new and old stories, but with one general thought repeating, "Kids today couldn't do it."
My granny and her family worked hard on the farm. She was one of the younger siblings, so didn't get to cook with her mother but made fun out of polishing floors. She and her younger sister would pull each other around on the cloth because polishing the old hard wood floor by hand required quite a bit of pressure.
Their basement was like a grocery store though she exclaimed, saying how her mother used to can everything from fruit to vegetables to meat to jam. There was a section for everything, while off in the corner of the basement was a pee pot for those cold winter nights.
She laughed saying that she'd wait as long as she possibly could because she wasn't going to the outside "biffy" in the dead of night nor was she going downstairs where the mice were.
One of the stories that I thought was quite interesting was that my great-grandfather would go around to different farms and would act as butcher for them when they were in need of meat. He would go, the one farm was five miles away, on foot. He wasn't offered a ride nor did he take a horse, he walked five miles to the farm and five miles back.
He was paid for his time, but not with money because times were tough back then, he was paid with the liver and heart.
Now I can eat liver, I don't care for the smell of it being cooked, but I have never and, unless I have to, likely will never eat heart. But, this was actually a typical part of my granny's diet in those early years.
My great-granny would clean it out well then stuff it with breading, much like we stuff turkeys, and it would be cooked and eaten.
It's these little stories, the little histories of families that need to be saved because one day you can share that with future generations. To know where you come from helps you know who you are, but it also lets you remember your loved ones if you are able to create something from them.
I'll write out the stories and share what I recorded with my family, at 90-years-old it may seem that my granny will live forever but this isn't the case and to have a record of her stories is important to me.
I just hope my oma will let me pick her brain about her memories too, because her story is a very different one than that of the Saskatchewan farmer in the 30s and 40s. She grew up in Holland during the war and upon first moving to Canada lived in a box car that had been adapted for living in with Opa.
I'm proud to say I come from hard working families and maybe that's why people tell me I work too hard, coming in on days off sometimes, because it's just in my genes to do so.
