Prompt #2 - My Birth

Prompt #2 (September 10, 2013) - My Birth


I was born in Rivers. I have always loved the sound of that. Borne in rivers. But Rivers is a town ten miles from our farm, which was five miles from our home town, Oak River, in Manitoba, Canada. I was born in Rivers, in Mrs. Madden's "nursing home" which meant a private home where pregnant women went to deliver. This was before the age of rural hospitals. I always knew that Donnie M was born there at the same time, and my Mum and his mother remembered each other. I did not know until more than 60 years later that the mother of another friend worked at that nursing home, possibly as a midwife, and thus was present at my birth. I wrote about this "coincidence" in my Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/

I was born on December 16 and ever since, 16 has been my lucky number. I do believe that my first memory is of a field of sparkling white snow (over which we would have driven to get to the farm, possibly in a horse-drawn wagon because the snow made the route for the car impassable.) The lane into the house was not built until the year I started school.

There are photos of me swaddled and in my parents arms, with a winter woodpile and axe in the background, and more from about six months of age, by the time it got warm enough to take babe in highchair outside. This was before the age of flash.

I was lucky last Christmas when my cousin Carol from Toronto forwarded me two pieces of paper she had gleaned while sorting through some trunks belonging to our mutual maternal grandmother. My birth announcement: a small card, a circular globe with a babe bursting through, like a chick hatching. Inside, my names Joan Margaret (after my godmother, my grandmother, and my mother), the date, time 11:30 pm, and weight which I cannot decipher, perhaps 5 or 7 and three-quarters pounds? And a letter inside a birthday card sent to my Grandmother (whose birthday was May 16) written by my mother, thanking her for gifts of a baby kimono and diapers and telling her about hand-me down bonnets and dresses from my cousin, and a wee wee pot. Mum describes how I was already sleeping through the night and how I "sure was good." I joke to friends how she never in my memory said such things to me.

I don't know whether I had hair. I know my brother was bald for his first eighteen months. My eyes are green and I believe have always been, like my Mum's.

Twins: I've always felt like a twin, although technically, not. My brother next to me is only eleven months younger. Donnie M had a sister born the same year as he was, and cousin Carol is also only less than a year older than her brother. It was after the war and people were making up for lost time, for the families they had postponed while the world was at war. I also have a twin cousin, Lew, born the morning of the very same day and year. He's the smart one. I don't think there was any collusion. I was born in Manitoba nine months after my parents were married in Kettle Valley, BC, with Uncle Tom the only relative of Dad's who was able to attend. Lew was born in Peace River, Uncle Jim and Aunt Dot's second child. Also, our best friends and next door neighbours for the first ten years of my life were twins, Linda and Leila, who were born in April, between my birthday and my brother's. I think being the oldest, and the only girl, have both had more impact.

Prompt #5 - My Childhood Home

Prompt #5 (September 29, 2013) - My Childhood Home

I lived in the same house on the same farm for the first seventeen years of my life, until the day I left home to go to university. And I never lived with my parents ever again after that. I loved living on a farm even though I was not the typical outdoors type of person. My father and brothers did what few barn chores there were and my mother did all the gardening and lawn care, so my responsibility was pretty much just my schoolwork. But I loved walking out into the pasture or across the fields or walking or biking down the roads and over to the nearest neighbours which, for the first ten years, was where the twins lived, Linda and Leila, and after that, my cousins, four boys all younger than me. The pasture was a magical place of grass, low box-like shrubs, and scrub bush, mostly Manitoba maple and poplar, with willow in the lower sections surrounding the sloughs (rhymes with “clues”) which are places where rainwater and runoff water collect, mostly in spring, and which have usually evaporated before the end of summer. If the water did not evaporate, then it would have been called a lake. The farm was on the Parklands of Manitoba, three quarter sections around the home place, most of it “broken” meaning under cultivation, planted in wheat, oats, barley, or flax, with clumps of bush around the farmstead and along the fencelines.

Set atop what passed for a hill on those plains, surrounded by a mature windbreak of Manitoba maple and American elm, and covered with grey asphalt siding, the house was old. It came with the farm. It had been built in 1891 and did not have a foundation or a basement. There was a cellar dug into the dirt underneath the main building which was accessed originally by a trap door from the kitchen. The house was heated by the cookstove and a space heater which burned originally, coal, then briquettes, then oil. The upstairs was heated by a chimney which snaked through the floor and walls and out through the roof. My mother always tried to improve the house. She had grown up in a much larger ranch house built the same year but in BC, about 2000 miles away. She painted and wallpapered and eventually got built-in cupboards installed and running water in a bathroom after “rural electrification” arrived, and a water cistern under the new master bedroom. We never had “flush toilets” at home, just an outhouse, but also the luxury of an “indoor honey bucket” during the winter. The downstairs floors were beige tile and the upstairs, grey linoleum. There was yellow congoleum around the kitchen walls and painted v-joint wainscotting which was removed and the walls covered with gyproc when a picture window was installed in the living room. I can barely remember the pre-electric light days, although I still have some of the kerosene lamps that we used back then.

My room was one of two small bedrooms under the slanted ceilings upstairs. I inherited its white wallpaper with red roses which I loved. The room had two big windows facing south which for one week every month were flooded with moonlight. I loved that room and the moon is one of the things I missed most when I moved to the city with all its light pollution. I still miss the moon, and the Northern Lights, and the winter sunlight on snow. And the wolf willow. The way it smells in June when its shy flowers bloom.

The first leaving consisted of day trips, going to school. A van (a private car contracted to transport schoolchildren) picked us up at the door at 8:25 am and drove us to school and home again by 3:55 pm. School was in town, Oak River, about five miles away. I did my whole school career there, eight years in the elementary school and four in the “new” high school, Oak River Collegiate (although my brothers, only one and three years behind me, both graduated from Rivers Collegiate, in a slightly larger town, about ten miles from our farm, because of consolidation.)

I left home to go to university, moving into women's residence at the University of Manitoba's Fort Garry campus. I loved university, and living on campus. There were 20,000 students there at that time (only twelve in my whole Grade 12 graduating class) so it was a bit of a culture shock, but in a good way. I learned to negotiate the buses around Winnipeg, a city of about one half a million people, then and now. I was there for four years and then three years summer school for teacher training. Some of the best years of my life.