Tag: Homesteading

Ginny’s Adventure

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 3 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning was MORASS — rather like a cross between a MARSH and a MESS. 🙂

This prompt led me through trees to a low, muddy spot where spring runoff collected and stagnated until the June sun evaporated it. There I spied a young lady lost in this unfamiliar land and heard some of her plight. I sat down and whacked out this story, but then we went to town and I never got it posted. Now here I am finally with my response to the RDP.

Ginny’s Adventure

Ginny wandered through the scraggly poplar woods for hours hoping to find a trail, but all she found was a morass of mud and rotten leaves, a low spot where winter snows had made a shallow pond. She realized the only way around it would mean fighting through willow and dogwood thickets. These had sprung up over the years as birds and beasts, attracted to the spring pond, had dropped around it seeds from their fur or feathers.

Sadly she turned back to the dry ground she’d just traipsed through, then decided to try circling part of the quagmire. Another time when she’d been with her brother when he’d taken his oxen to a pond for a drink, he’d pointed out a trail through the woods. He explained how deer and other animals made trails like that to watering holes. “But beware,” he warned, “because wolves use these trails, too.”

Perhaps animals had made a trail to this pond. She gathered up her long skirt again and began to make her way around the clumps of brush. It didn’t take long until she did discover a narrow trail. She thought about those wolves. Or even deer.

“Mother deer can be very protective,” Herb had said. “You don’t want to pester one guarding her fawn, or you’ll feel her sharp hooves.”

For a moment she gave in to the despair she felt about this her whole situation. Anger flared, too. It was beastly of father to gamble away everything they had! Now mother was in a pension for impoverished gentlewomen and she’d been shipped off to Canada, a nuisance to Herb and his new wife. And now she’d made things worse by getting lost in this forest.

She considered her options: turn back and keep wandering, lost, through the woods until they came searching for her–or some animal did her in. Or she could take this trail and pray it would lead her out of the woods and she’d meet no vicious creatures on the way. She felt the urge to try. She had no clue where it would lead her, but at least she could walk on the path’s packed ground instead of crunching over layers of leaves and twigs. Hopefully it would lead her out of these smothering woods.

Following the trail for what seemed like an hour, she reached a clearing. Some homesteader had cut down the trees here for his stove; only the stumps remained. Part of clearing his 160 acres. And father on, she could see a green field, maybe his very first crop coming up.

Ginny threw up her arms in a gesture of rejoicing, and resolved to never go wandering in these woods again. She may not like being here in Chesterville, living in a four-room house with her brother and his wife, but she wasn’t ready to die, either.

Things that Crepitate in the Night

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 5 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today was CREPITATE.

Never heard of it? Well, perhaps you’ve encountered some of its relatives:
CREPITANT – making a crackling or rustling sound
CREPUSCULE – Twilight
CREPUSCULAR – relating to or resembling twilight; active during twilight

DECREPIT – worn out or ruined by age or neglect
DECREPITUDE – the state of being decrepit
DECREPITATE – roast a substance such as salt to cause crackling, disintegrate audibly when heated – rather the opposite of popcorn. 🙂

CREPITATE and its cousins originated from the Latin verb crepitare: to crackle or rustle.

And now to use these crinkly words. Last night I read a short memoir from the winter of 1919-1920, one of the most severe on record here in western Canada. The writer told of how a family spent it in a log cabin near Olds, in the southern Alberta foothills. I‘ll use some of her memories as seed for my story.

Winter hit us early that year; snow came in October and stayed. Hit us hard, too; when it got cold, it stayed cold. Worse yet, we as a family had to move to an abandoned shack twenty miles away after a chimney fire damaged our home. We arrived on our wagon with our smoke-smelly belongings just before sundown and looked at the decrepit cabin that was to be our home this winter.

“Doesn’t look the best right now,” Mother said, “but hopefully it’ll be snug. It was home to another family just two years ago.”

Dad put his arm around her. “We’ll get a fire going and warm up the place. And we’ll do what we can to make it livable.”

My seven-year-old brother Willy and I eyed the steep hill not far from the house, thinking with delight about the sledding days we’d have.

The Rockies loomed in the crepuscule as we moved in, crunching through the deep snow with our stuff. While the last things were being unloaded, Mother began shifting the kindling wood beside the cook stove with the thought of making a fire. Crepitant sounds came from one corner and Father had to evict the first of our tiny tenants.

“We’re apt to see a few crepuscular critters come out tonight,” he said. “Skunks and raccoons move into an abandoned place pretty quick.”

Our problem didn’t come from skunks, thankfully. But once the house was warm we did hear smaller creatures crepitating under the floor boards and wondered what they were. A couple of days later as we were finishing our supper Willy dropped his spoon on the floor and forgot to pick it up. The next morning as I helped Mother set the table I noticed we were short a spoon. “Hey Willy, didn’t you pick up that spoon last night?”

He groaned and scrambled under the table to retrieve it. A moment later he held up something small and dark between his fingers. “Look! The spoon’s gone, but see this. An arrowhead. Wow!” He was thrilled with his find.

“Pack rats,” Mother pronounced. “Likely that’s the rustling we’ve been hearing. We need to be careful not to leave anything shiny laying around.”

A lesson we learned the hard way. Buttons, bottle caps, and other small objects left lying would disappear overnight and we’d find small, pretty stone in its place. We’d nod and say, “Our pack rats are trading again.”

Dad worked at making the shack as cozy as possible and Mother made it as homey as she could. Willy and I had great fun on that hill. It proved perfect for our sled and we the abundance of snow softened our tumbles when we rolled down. Near the top of the hill a poplar sapling stuck out of the snow and Willy decided one day to carve a big W in the white bark.

In spring we moved back to our house that had been “in the fixing” all winter. While we were happy to be home, we thought about the old cabin and one day in June we all got on our wagon and went to have a picnic on the hill there.

When we got to the cabin we were amazed to find there was no hill. Rather, there was a big slough full of cattails where the hill had stood. There were smaller trees around the slough, but the poplar we thought was a sapling turned out to be tree twelve inches around the base of the trunk. We knew that must be our tree, because Willy finally spotted his W – 25 feet up the trunk.

We spent all that winter playing on a huge hill of snow!

Smoother Spelling

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 5 Comments

Good morning everyone,

Today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt word is SMOOTH — an excellent, versatile word.

My dictionary claims this comes from the Old English smōth. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems English is the only language with a unique TH sound. And yet more, we’re blessed with two. Consider the SMOOTH TOOTH, for example. Do you have ny idea how much anguish these two sounds give ESL students?

It may have been much handier for learners — and certainly for spellers — had the ancients decided on separate spellings. FTH or THF for the one blown out and TH for the other — as in “this, that and the other” — which would make ‘tooth’ spelled toofth. Youngsters and people with missing teeth are apt to say “toof” anyway, and “fink” instead of think.

Back to things that are SMOOTH:
Once upon a time I took up the hobby of painting on rocks. Just bugs and such, as I don’t have access to the huge, smooth stones such as people by the ocean can find. With less than perfect stones you can use putty to fill in the dips and bumps, but rocks need to be tumbled in water for years, maybe even centuries, to polish them to a smooth roundness.

Beech & stone.Wokandapix
Art by Wokandapix  —  Pixabay

Along the Saskatchewan River, not so very far from us, there are rocks embedded in the soil on the hillsides, but the ones I see are chunky. Right here where we live the soil is classed as dune sand, a once-upon-a-time flood plain. You can dig down ten meters and rarely find a stone of any size. All this sand is great for purifying the rain-water that soaks in.

The water table is high, only about two metres down; the original settlers in this area dug their wells with a shovel. Now one enterprising young man has a high pressure water “drill” and drills holes for posts by washing out the sand and dirt mix. Talk about a smooth operation.

Baby Bird Shuffle

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 8 Comments

One Boy’s Efforts to Correct Nature’s Shortcomings

Finding herself an impoverished widow at the beginning of the Great Depression, Maida (Parlow) Knowles moved back to the old homestead her grandparents had established on the banks of the St Lawrence River. This abandoned farm had a large apple orchard, but the trees had been neglected for years. Rather than living in a seedy, cockroach-infested apartment and leaving her three young sons to roam the streets of Toronto while she tried to hold down a job, she wanted to bring the orchard back into production and earn a living for herself and her boys.

Having lived all their lives in the city, however, she and her three sons were having quite the learning experience getting their run-down farmhouse fixed up, and the apple orchard ready. When they arrived at the farm, she was appalled to see the house’s back porch and its roof lying on the ground. She was also dismayed, those first few nights, to lie in bed and see the stars through the holes in her roof.

One day during that first summer, she was outside picking up some of the porch roof shingles that were scattered. They made great kindling for the old wood stove, on which she was learning to cook their food. Suddenly she heard loud, angry voices and her three sons came along, the oldest two dragging five-year-old Alan by the arms.

“You’ll never guess what he did now, Mom!” The older boys glared in righteous indignation at the tearful transgressor. “He got into the birds’ nests in the apple trees and moved all the eggs and the baby birds around. They’re so mixed up now their poor mothers will never find them!”

“Yeah. Whatever is God thinking about the awful thing you did, Alan Knowles?”

She felt an urge to laugh at the very idea, but stifled it. This was, after all, a major crime to the two oldest boys. The accused hung his head and made no defence. (He told his mother later that he hadn’t dared to explain with his two big brothers screeching and glaring at him so furiously. They weren’t going to listen to a word he said, anyway.)

To defuse the issue a bit she told him he’d best go and tend to the cats so they wouldn’t find out about the confusion in the orchard before the baby birds learned to fly. Happy with his light sentence, he dried his tears and hurried off to the shed where their new cat family lived.

Looking back some years later, he explained to his mother the reason for his actions that day. “I’d been watching the birds coming and going to their nests and I noticed that some mother birds didn’t leave their nests for long; they seemed to grab some food and come back quickly. Others stayed away a lot longer. I was afraid the eggs and babies would get cold when their mothers were gone so long, so I just moved the eggs and baby birds to the nests where the mothers came back sooner, because I thought they’d be better looked after.”

It made perfect sense to him at the time. ☺

This was one of the accounts Maida recorded in the diary she kept during those first years and later published as her memoir: Apples Don’t Just Grow by Maida Parlow (Knowles) French
© 1954 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd

More Branches on the Family Tree

~ Christine Goodnough ~ Leave a comment

Our daughter and son-in-law have gotten interested in Ancestry.com, which revives my interest in my family. I googled my Mom’s grandfather, Leith Lyall Falconer and happened to find a record of his marriage. then my daughter did a census search and came up with more information.

So if there are any other Falconer or Harmon descendants out there doing research on this family, I’ll post this bit of information I’ve discovered:

Minnesota Census, May 1875, shows the family of John Falconer and his wife Jemimah, both born in Scotland:

John………………age 47
Jemimah…………age 45
Children:
Mary………………..16
Alexander…………..14
Catherine……………12
John B………………10
W.W. ……………….. 6
Leith Lyall………….. 2

Leith Lyall married Rebecca Working in 1893
Children:
Agnes Pearl………. Mar 12, 1897
Thelma Lenora…..   ? , 1899

Harmon connection:

James Welcome Harmon was born in Elk River, Minnesota, married Mary Wilson, and homesteaded at St Brieux, Saskatchewan.

Agnes married Jesse Lyn Harmon, son James W Harmon
Children: Glen, Aleitha, Olive, Jesse Jr.

Agnes died in 1950

Thelma married his brother Floyd on Oct 18, 1918
Children:
Rebecca, Louise Agnes, James, Ruby, Leith

Thelma died of cancer in 1937

Louise Agnes was my mother; she married Allen Vance in June 1951