by Helen P. Lang
Mother’s Day
Everybody on earth has a mother, but few people have had a mother like ours. Her name was Grace, and it was the perfect name for her. Her grace wasn’t just physical: it was her manner, her goodness, her caring for others. She was strong. She had to be. There were three of us kids, plus a husband who loved her, but I recall her during tough times when we were living in a house without plumbing, running water or electric lights. She never lost her sense of humour, nor wept in our presence, though God knows she had cause. We were poor, but then so were most others. We wore clothes donated by richer relatives, but she had a “thing” about second-hand shoes, believing that you would inherit foot problems suffered by the original wearer, so, although we often had shoes with holes in the soles (covered daily with cardboard)
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SEASIDE TIMES
During the Great Depression she raised chickens and turkeys to be sold for Christmas money and grew an enormous vegetable garden. She bottled fruit, made jam and mincemeat, washed clothes on a washboard in a huge tub on the back porch, dried them on a clothes-line and ironed them with what was called a “flat iron” which she heated on top of the stove. This stove, of course, burned wood which had to be chopped, carried into the house and fed into the stove’s innards. The ash had to be dumped daily. It makes me tired just to recall those days. My mum had a big copper “boiler” in which really soiled clothes were first soaked and then boiled on top of the stove before being transferred to the washtub on the porch. That same washtub was our bathtub, and we children took turns using it, being careful not to splash water on the wooden floors. There was what was called “an airtight heater” in the hall outside the bedrooms, and this, too, required wood, but during the winters, when the wood burned low and the fire died, we piled on the blankets, some of them tattered grey woollen ones purchased from the Salvation Army.
MT (Look for us in the courtyard)
and went barefoot all summer, we always got new shoes when school started in the fall.
We children didn’t realize we were poor; we loved the freedom of the outdoors on what was,I suppose, a small farm where we had a cow as well as the chickens. There was a barn, and on the rise above the slough, a most wonderful treasure – a pile of discarded articles: broken saucers, cups without handles, wheels from a broken bicycle, pieces of scrap lumber – all the marvelous things children need to build forts, make furniture, cars and even houses (whose roofs always leaked). During those lean years men looking for work, when passing our house, always seemed to come in and ask for something to eat.
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