Prompt # 53 - Home Town

Prompt # 53 – Home Town

I grew up on a farm 4.5 miles south of a small prairie town called Oak River, about 50 miles north of Brandon, Manitoba. The town is so small that Facebook will not accept it as a place, so I have to list my hometown as Rivers where I was born, which was about 10 miles south east of the farm. I went to school in Oak River for all twelve years before leaving to go to university in Winnipeg.

                                                            A little town on the prairie.

Oak River is still on the map. At least one hundred people live there, about half what it was fifty years ago. It is a victim of technology. Bigger machines mean bigger farms worked by fewer people. It exists still mainly to service the farms which surround it. Groceries, quick freeze, gasoline, mail, coffee shops, pub, farm equipment, hardware. There used to be a drug store, liquour store, and in the earlier years, the 1950s, a telephone exchange, an egg grading station, a blacksmith shop, general goods store including clothing, a railway station. Even the grain elevators are gone now, and the tracks have been pulled up.

                                                     Main Street in winter in the 1950s.

Grain is now trucked to a modern elevator about ten miles away. The high school kids (grades 7 to 12) are bussed to Rivers. The bank is now a credit union. I believe there is still an active curling and skating rink and that golf has joined baseball as the summer recreation. There is a seniors complex now. The old school has been torn down, and the elementary school uses the building that was built as a high school for us. It had four classrooms, a hallway lined with lockers, a gym, a science lab, but no library.

                                          This old elementary school has been torn down.

I never lived in town but for a few years my grandparents were retired there, and many school friends were town kids, if their parents worked as teachers, or in other service industries such as butcher shop, mechanics, retail, etc. In high school, kids from the neighbouring smaller town of Cardale were bussed to Oak River, which provided an opportunity to make new friends. I am still in touch with my best friend from Grade Nine, Leona, who lives near Calgary. I no longer have any aunts, uncles, or cousins living in my old hometown. I don't think anyone from my grade still lives in the area. We all had to leave for higher education and for employment.