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One summer offered hope during Depression years MARY COOK Memories
I
t seemed to me we lived in a constant state of anxiousness. Mother and Father so often wore worried looks that sent a pall over the entire household. The egg money in the blue sugar bowl never seemed to be enough to cover our needs.
Frivolity, like a few slices of bologna from Briscoe’s General Store or a package of Cracker Jacks after our Saturday peddling of Mother’s wares in Renfrew was out of the question. And then one summer everything changed.
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It was almost like someone had lifted a roller blind in a darkened room, letting in sunshine. It didn’t happen suddenly, but it came as the summer wore on. The season started out like any other. Father planted the fields, Mother raised hens from chickens, packets of seeds arrived in the mail and were planted. But that year, as spring rolled into summer, I knew in my heart, that year things were going to be different. For one thing, there were no frosty days or nights to kill what had been planted. But one season blended into the other, as if by some magic plan there was nothing to halt the natural growth in the fields and in the ample garden. That year there were no heavy rains to flood the seedlings or leave big pools of water in the low lying fields. The rain came as often as was needed. Soft wonderful rain and often, as if led by some outside hand, it fell during the warm nights so that Father was able to spend the days tending to the crops. The rain barrels, empty at night sitting at the corners of the back of the old log house, would be filled in the mornings from the runoff of the eaves as we slept in our beds. It was wonderful soft rain water which Mother put to good use. That year there was no drought. Gone were the cracks in the soil at our back stoop that in other years we saw after weeks of a dry spell: parched ground, crumbling under
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our bare feet, and burning the soles. That year, when everything seemed to change, the ground was moist to the touch. And I would see Father walk the back fields. After the morning chores and often after supper, he would go over to the West Hill, cross the Bonnechere and look – just look – and he would come back to the house and I could see a spring in his step that in other years
The rain barrels, empty at night sitting at the corners of the back of the old log house, would be filled in the mornings from the runoff of the eaves as we slept in our beds.
was so often missing. Sometimes I would go with him. Father was not one to talk idly, so we would walk in silence. And I would watch him stop at the alfalfa field and pull at a few stacks, rubbing them between the palms of his hands. The buckwheat field, the last to be planted, was already starting to turn to a golden brown. To me it looked like a large velvet carpet. See GARDEN, page 35
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