Introduction

Dick, Winnie, Don and Frank (Owen not born)

My life began on an Alberta farm in the Dirty Thirties. My father, at twenty-six, had made what he called “a rather wrenching move” from the North of England to a raw quarter section of land near Edmonton in the early 1900’s.

My mother Winnie McKitrick was his second wife, his first having died of a stroke six years before I arrived.  I am the middle child of her three boys and a half-brother to two older boys who had left home before the start of the second family.

It was also a late marriage (in those days) for my mother. Her fiancé had been killed in the First World War and she remained a spinster school teacher until she met my dad and married at the age of thirty-two. She was quite clear about the kind of man she would have for a husband. She would not marry a farmer, nor a widower, nor an Englishman (remittance men gave them a bad name).

The Photograph

Memories bubble to the surface every time I view this framed sixty-year-old 12”x15” hand-coloured photograph of the farmstead where I grew up just outside of Edmonton. This piece of paradise, now long gone, was the wellspring of my existence.

Although it may not fit the strict definition of an heirloom, it is important to me for a couple of reasons. One is that it is a graphic generator of countless memories from my youth, nearly all happy ones. Every detail in the picture evokes a memory of some event or situation.

The Peripatetic Preacher

Grandpa Austin and Grandma Jennie (nee Timney)

In the year of our Lord Eighteen Sixty-One: Dickens’ “Great Expectations” was published; the American Civil War broke out; my maternal grandfather, Austin McKitrick was born; and his mother’s uncle Orange Lawrence committed suicide.

Austin’s life began in Orangeville, Ontario, the town founded by this great uncle. We begin with Orange Lawrence because he was a larger than life character, and because it was he who introduced Austin’s parents to each other.

On the Kitchen Table

A small disc-shaped image shimmers on the pale yellow wall of our cozy farmhouse kitchen. As the spring morning sun bathes my breakfast on the old wooden oil-cloth covered table, the surface of my steaming cup of cocoa is the source of this mirrored quivering projection.

Breakfast fare was predictable during my war-time pre-teen school years. It began with a healthy bowl of porridge; a gelatinous, milk-doused, and sugared combination of “Sunny Boy” cereal (wheat, rye, and flax), and rolled oats.  Next was white and brown bread

Owen's Wheels

Owen and the old '37 Chev

Owen has just left the University Hospital when he and I meet for the first time at Aunt Eva’s stuffy little bungalow on a quiet street in Edmonton. It is June 1940 and he is only four days old. Our mother Winnie is nursing him as she gently eases to and fro on a creaky armless heirloom rocking chair. I am a naive lad not yet seven, and this never-before-seen maternal activity is a lot for me to take in. Feeling a bit shy about watching, I decide to follow the example of the adults and act “normal”. Owen is Mom’s third child and Dad’s fifth (two from his first marriage) - all boys. Knowing that Dad really wanted a girl, Aunt Eva jokes, “You’ll have to try again for a girl.” Dad is now fifty-nine and Mom forty-three. When Mom responds with “Not a chance”, I think to myself “How can she know that?”

Thundershower

The sweet scent of newly stacked alfalfa hay pervades the sultry summer air. The bladed fan atop the windmill towering over the barn-red pump house is windlessly inert against the almost cloudless azure sky. Almost - because a line of cumulus puffballs is rising on the western horizon. The calm and muggy air is punctuated by the bubbling notes of a meadowlark on the garden gatepost and the occasional sweet, sweet, sweet of a yellow warbler in the lilac bush below the sun porch window.

The Fall Show

Hampshire Ewes in the North Field by the Creek

“Watch where you’re going you clumsy old clod; step back and mind your own business!” The burly red-faced man in the crumpled hat and bib overalls angrily mutters these words right in my dad’s face.  My naïve fourteen year-old farm-boy mind is shocked by this rude reaction to Dad’s gentle bump. It’s early November 1947 and the scene is the weigh-in area for the market lamb competition at the Edmonton Annual Fall Livestock Show and Sale.

Dad’s entry in this market lamb class is just one of a number of sheep my brother Dick and I are